Boom! (film)

Boom! is a 1968 British drama film directed by Joseph Losey and starring Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and Noël Coward. It was adapted from the play The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore by Tennessee Williams.

This article is about the 1968 British drama film. For the 2004 Bollywood film, see Boom (film).

Boom!
Theatrical release poster
Directed byJoseph Losey
Produced byJohn Heyman
Screenplay byTennessee Williams
Based onThe Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore
by Tennessee Williams
StarringElizabeth Taylor
Richard Burton
Noël Coward
Music byJohn Barry
CinematographyDouglas Slocombe
Edited byReginald Beck
Distributed byUniversal Pictures
Release date
  • 28 May 1968 (1968-05-28)
Running time
113 minutes
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
Italian
Budget$3–10 million[1][2]
Box office$2 million[1]

Plot

Flora 'Sissy' Goforth (Taylor, in a part written for an older woman) is a terminally ill woman living with a coterie of servants in a large mansion on a secluded island. Into her life comes a mysterious man, Christopher Flanders, nicknamed "Angelo Del Morte" (played by then-husband Burton, in a part intended for a very young man). The mysterious man may or may not be "The Angel of Death".

The interaction between Goforth and Flanders forms the backbone of the plot, with both of the major characters voicing lines of dialogue that carry allegorical and Symbolist significance. Secondary characters chime in, such as "the Witch of Capri" (Coward). The movie mingles respect and contempt for human beings who, like Goforth, continue to deny their own death even as it draws closer and closer. It examines how these characters can enlist and redirect their fading erotic drive into the reinforcement of this denial.

Cast

Production

Filming took place on the island of Sardinia at the Porto Conte Natural Park near Alghero, and was the site of a close call for actress Taylor. A trailer that served as her dressing room came loose from its moorings only a few seconds after she stepped out of it, and "plunged over a 150-foot embankment into the sea".[3]

Reception

The film was received poorly by critics, and maintains a 20% rating at Rotten Tomatoes from 15 reviews.[4]

Time wrote "They display the self-indulgent fecklessness of a couple of rich amateurs hamming it up at the country-club."[5] Paul D. Zimmerman, writing for Newsweek, called it "a pompous, pointless nightmare". The Hollywood Reporter called it "An ordeal in tedium", and Saturday Review called it "Outright junk". Lawrence Devine in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner asked "Why was Boom! filmed in the first place?" Wilfred Sheed wrote in Esquire: "Let them [Taylor and Burton] by all means do their thing, but why film it and charge admission?" Richard Schickel wrote in Life: "That title could not be more apt; it is precisely the sound of a bomb exploding."[6]

Filmmaker John Waters admires the film,[7][8] and chose it as a favorite to present in the first Maryland Film Festival in 1999. The film's poster is visible in Waters' 1972 film Pink Flamingos. In an interview with Robert K. Elder for his book The Best Film You've Never Seen, Waters describes the film as "beyond bad. It's the other side of camp. It's beautiful, atrocious, and it's perfect. It's a perfect movie, really, and I never tire of it."[9]

gollark: They had designed ARM CPUs for ages for their phones. Recently they got good enough and/or Intel annoyed them enough that they switched over.
gollark: ARM is an instruction set. "Traditional CPU[s]" use the x86 instruction set. People argue a lot over which design is best but broadly speaking there doesn't seem to be *that* much difference, although x86 has some advantages like I think greater code density and downsides like variable length instructions being annoying to decode.
gollark: That's not a very valid comparison. But Apple's cores are somewhat better than available x86 ones.
gollark: Apparently they did lose most of their CPU design team to some other company recently, so who knows.
gollark: It's really annoying to me that you can only get the best CPUs with Apple's ridiculous ecosystem and design.

References
  1. Boom! on IMDb
  2. Losey on 'broken promises' Barker, Dennis. The Guardian, 1 Aug 1973: 6.
  3. "Trailer Takes Plunge Into Sea, but Not Liz", Chicago Tribune, October 8, 1967, p18
  4. Boom! at Rotten Tomatoes
  5. "New Movies: Boom!". Time. 31 May 1968.
  6. http://www.movie-film-review.com/devfilm.asp?rtype=3&id=2103
  7. Abraham, Amelia (12 August 2015). "John Waters on the Terrible, Trashy Films That Changed His Life". Vice.com. Vice.com. Retrieved 15 July 2016.
  8. "Trash and Treasure: John Waters on 'Boom!'". MovieTime. ABC Radio National. 21 October 2011. Retrieved 15 July 2016.
  9. Elder, Robert K. (1 June 2013). The Best Film You've Never Seen: 35 Directors Champion the Forgotten or Critically Savaged Movies They Love. Chicago Review. Chicago, IL. ISBN 9781569768389.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.