“What’s human or inhuman is not for human decision!”
I love Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and have always been curious about the other movies they made together, particularly when their tabloid exploits as a movie star couple overshadowed them. Most of them I’ve heard are not so hot (barring The Taming Of The Shrew and The Sandpiper which I have heard are both good). Boom! (1968) has always held a stronger reputation as a cult object, mainly through reading about director John Waters love for it as a “so bad it’s good” favourite; I was reminded of this at a triple feature of John Waters movies, with two of them referencing Boom! (a poster hung up in a character’s home in Pink Flamingos, the title card used in a sex montage from A Dirty Shame).
The experience of watching Boom! felt like a midway point between a Michelangelo Antonioni art film and a Planet Of The Apes sequel. Based on a Tennessee Williams play and directed by Joseph Losey, the story is set on a coastal Italian island (actually shot on Sardinia) owned by a massively wealthy widow Flora “Sissy” Goforth (Taylor) who is slowly dying, receiving blood infusions and injections from a private doctor, while she dictates her memoirs to a secretary (Joanna Shimkus) and barks orders at her staff. She also changes outfits constantly, the highlight being a towering headpiece that she wears to dinner with her gossipy friend, only known as “The Witch Of Capri” (Noel Coward). Arriving on the island is a poet named Christopher Flanders (Burton) who has a reputation for shacking up and freeloading from wealthy older women; a character written as a young drifter in the original play but here portrayed by a grey-haired chested, middle-aged Burton. As they spar in flowing robes on the terrace with its view of the other rocks jutting out of the ocean and the crashing waves, it feels like the movie star version of Pink Floyd’s Live In Pompeii – a performance given in ancient ruins to an audience of no-one.
Ornate and overwrought, and ultimately ponderous and strange, fuelled by the giddy application of the word “bitch” (the height of its foul language), Boom! feels like a product of the late 1960s studio Hollywood era, a behemoth about to be upset by the Easy Riders etc, even as it strains for symbolic meaning and gaudy artiness, as if just catching up to being Bergmanesque or Felliniesque. Yet even within the thinking of “Who was this for?” it is an enjoyable bout of excess and ego, with Taylor dominating her scenes and Burton surprisingly underplaying it in contrast. Nothing funnier to me than the mise en scene of Taylor reliving and re-enacting her husband’s death dramatically in her bedroom over the intercom, and the cut to her staff in the kitchen listening in boredom. John Barry provides a memorable theme with the score, which is both jaunty and eerie. Recommended.
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