Movie (Published 1972) (2024)

Y & ZEE” Is a blatant and hollow confection. Part straightfaced ladies matinee melodrama, part “Suzy Says” peeks in

to jet set shenanigans, the film alternately mocks and uses earnestly the soap opera conventions of its classic romantic triangle story. Though its heart is essentially middle‐class conservative, the film tries for the modern note: like Bob and Carol, its married couple ‐openly discuss their infidelity; the language is what is known as frank; and this being a contemporary triangle, ac/dc arrangements are included.

As it trundles bloatedly to its muddy conclusion, the film serves up enough stereotypes to fire the resentment of women's lib. For all its mod overlay, offers a solidly Victorian conception of women: there's the fair heroine, all weepy and pale (she listens to serene classics), and the dark heroine, all hot, earthy passion (she listens to juiced‐up hard rock), and neither of them has any real life apart from her desire for gexual gratification.

Under kinkier guise, “X I’ & Zee” is a kind of remake of “The Sandpiper” (which, of course, was a remake of remake of a remake. ). Sporting most unheroic corporation up front, Michael Caine has the Richard Burton manbetween part, poor Susannah York (once a lesbian, always a lesbian, according to the Hollywood casting code) suffers, with variations, in the Eva Marie Saint part, and Elizabeth Taylor plays the Elizabeth Taylor part.

It's for this last that I think “X Y & Zee” is worth a few minutes of your time. Miss Taylor's contribution to the film is a healthy boost to my conviction that, after all the talk of directors, screenwriters, photographers, editors, after all the critical battles about just who is responsible for a film's personality, it is the actor (or, as the case may be, the star) who is, more often than not, a film's ultimate auteur. An obvious point, certainly, but the actor has been of late something of dethroned auteur: perhaps the very obviousness of his contribution to the “feel” of a film has relegated him the critical outfield.

Whatever you may say about it, “X Y a: Zee” is. from first frame to last, an auteur film, and the auteur is Elizabeth Taylor. It's a Taylor the way Ford's a Ford or a Hitchco*ck's a Hitchco*ck or a Bergman's a Bergman. Though I'm crazy about her, I don't mean to place Miss Taylor on the same level of accomplishmnt as the directors, but her film is drenched in her personality the way an auteur director's work is identified by his.

“X Y & Zee” is not only dominated by Elizabeth Taylor's film persona, it is an exploitation of it. Everything has been made to order for the film's display of its star. Situation (a rocky, “Virginia Woolf” marriage), lines (plenty of good, bitchy Taylor barbs), clothes (wild colors, large sizes: La Taylor looks as she's advertising portable psychedelic tents), even camera angles and movements resonate with echoes from her past work. In the same way that an auteur critic gets “mileage” out of film to the degree that he's familiar with its director, so enjoyment of this film depends on more than passing acquaintance with the Taylor career. If you neither know nor care anything about that career, “X Y & Zee” will seem an altogether superfluous piece of celluloid. But if, like me, you're a fervent Elizabethan, the film will be fun—because it's a spectacular showcase for our girl's screen personality — and little disheartening, because it is nothing more elevated than a splashy, trashy

Maintaining (and it's just as well) rather distant connection to her character and to her fellow actors, Miss Taylor, in what is surely a self‐directed performance, provides a vaudeville “turn,” a circus‐like review of Elizabeth Taylor shtick. It's gaudy, good‐natured self‐parody in which she burlesques her bitch ‐ goddess, earth ‐ mother image as well as her unesthetic plumpness (hell, she's plain fat, and she knows it, and, good for her, she doesn't give hoot). We're treated to a generous screen test which gives us various “stations” of the actress's range, from tender‐sentimental to prima donna temtantrums.

Flecked with echoes and cross‐references, the character of Zee is an anthology of the star's career. Zee is the composite Elizabeth Taylor shrew. Liz‐Zee specializes in the shriek, the sneer, and the snarl. Eyes flashing, arms flailing, lip curling, nostrils flaring, hair tossing, she enters into verbal battle with the relish of a prize race horse at the starting gate. Like Martha in “Virginia Woolf,” Zee is an expert in the marital squabble. Like almost all her characters since Martha, Liz's Zee is spectacularly vulgar—she exults in her four‐letter dialogue, her repertory of dirty stories, her hot‐bloodedness.

Ah, but underneath the defensive, abrasive exterior (she's only playing bitch, after all) is a little girl vulnerability, a remnant of that pert and charming ingenue of the forties and early fifties, that sweet and poised Elizabeth Taylor who reached her apotheosis in “A Place in the Sun.”

The specialist will note that Zee's preoccupation with food is a development of that lovely comic scene in “Reflections in a Golden Eye” in which the daffy Taylor character describes In mouth‐watering detail her refreshments for the officers’ party. And the true buff will remark the inclusion of that late fifties staple, the Elizabeth Taylor confession scene, inaugurated in “Raintree County” (that virtuoso monologue in which her Southern belle remembers the traumatic night of the fire In the ancestral homestead) and brought to perfection in Liz's finest screen moment, the monologue at the end of “Suddenly Last

“Giant,” “Raintree County,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” “Suddenly Last Summer,” “Reflections in a Golden Eye”: no one is better at the spoiled Southern belle. The funniest moment in the current film (it brought down the house) occurs when an enraged Liz fires at hubby, in her Southern finest, a profane variation on Gable's “Frankly, Scarlett, I don't give a damn” — it's a reminder of former glories.

The Taylor mannerisms are at full mast here too: the raunchy, gutsy laugh: the voice, a dry, sancipapery, sibilant, unmusical, lovely, sexy thing indeed; the overworked pattern of pause, stumble, repeat; that Hollywood “r”—not exactly English, certainly not natural American; and a new tic, the frequent squinting and narrowing of the famous eyes.

Zee represents something of a final flowering all baroque overemphasis and Jacobean decadence. Liz clearly had a ball; it's a nice valentine to her fans, but it's not a disciplined, integrated, carefully judged performance. And what do you do for an encore after this operatic camp? Retirement? Unthinkable: never! But what about a drastic rerouting: a full‐bodied script, character that discovers new and further facets of her not large but sturdily serviceable range, a tough, nononsense director who will erase the mannerist excesses and find again the in the