Butterfield 8 (French Import) DVD, 1960

Elizabeth Taylor stars as a bed-hopping Manhattan dress model who changes when she encounters an unhappily married man as disillusioned as she is.

Elizabeth Taylor earned her first Best Actress Oscar for the role of Gloria Wandrous, a ‘model’ engaged in an affair with a married man (Laurence Harvey), in this hit film.

She had personal reasons to view it with disdain however, as it threatened to seal Taylor’s reputation in the public mind as a scarlet woman, following as it did hard upon her ‘stealing’ Debbie Reynolds’ husband, Eddie Fisher (who co-stars here).

The story’s details are heavily Hays-Coded – Gloria is clearly a call girl, as she is in John O’Hara’s original 1935 novel – but, unlike the similarly evasive Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which was released the following year, it eschews screwball charm for an odd combination of gloss and sleaze.

However, there’s some marvellously catty dialogue here, courtesy of co-writer John Michael Hayes (who gave Thelma Ritter some of her best-ever lines in Hitchcock’s Rear Window), and also plenty of lush cinematography.

Taken together, this is a fascinating item from the last days of Hollywood melodrama.

Nick Riddle on 12th July 2011
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