Radically individualistic, Hollywood goddess Elizabeth Taylor consistently chose latter day celluloid projects that probably boggled the minds of those who had grown accustomed to her charms via such mainstream heart warmers as National Velvet and Father of the Bride.
Portraying characters drawn to acting out twisted facsimiles of familial relations or those haunted by specters of overwhelming death, Taylor’s roles in her thirties and forties often contained hysterical and delusional elements – traits commonly found in many of our most popular horror heroines.
Disney villainesses, the hysterically hobbled, unseen diva in Argento’s Opera and the matriarchal forces in such modern fright offerings as You’re Next & Ready or Not, for instance, definitely find themselves embedded in the emotional lifelines of Flora Goforth, her character in 1968’s incredibly wacked out Boom! A mean-spirited mansion dweller, Goforth is one of Tennessee Williams’ most indulgent characters. Cruel to all around her, she seems to both long for the escape of the grave while desperately and cravenly clinging to her seemingly very miserable mortality.
Enter Richard Burton as the enigmatic Christopher Flanders. Viewers soon realize, after some lustful thespian volleying, back and forth, of very cryptic dialogue that Flanders, who has descended upon Goforth’s remote paradise, is the Angel of Death and that Goforth’s time on earth is going to be very limited. After Noel Coward’s arch appearance as (of all things) The Witch of Capri, the dialogue between Taylor and Burton gets even more inscrutable.
This delirious denseness, even though Williams, perhaps in as doth protest too much moment, listed this as his favorite filmed adaptation of his work, resulted in a critical and financial failure upon release. Still peach ripe and filmed through a lusty lens, Taylor’s glitter edged work here does lend itself to camp, though. This has allowed uber-fans like John Waters to sing the project’s many awkward praises as the decades have passed.
Interestingly, the piece is also very reminiscent, in an orgiastic, oversaturated manner, of Nothing in the Dark, the 1962 The Twilight Zone episode in which a very young, almost achingly lovely Robert Redford plays the male equivalent of the grim reaper.
That Redford, in this author’s opinion, surely bests Burton as a figurehead of muddy mortality, does nothing to take away from Taylor’s power in Boom! The prototypical movie star, she also provides enough essence to feed the minds of genre critics for decades to come.
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