Boom! A melodrama fit for Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton’s doomed love affair
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“My very first memory is of pain.” More than a touch dramatic, the words could easily be lifted from the script of Boom! Instead, they are a real-life confession by its leading lady, Elizabeth Taylor.
When it comes to pain, Taylor is the poster child-star. In her long life, the actor underwent more than 30 surgeries and was supposedly hospitalised on more than 100 occasions. After a bout of pneumonia almost took her out in 1961, it was the pain of nearly losing her that led to her best actress sympathy win at the Oscars. And she would win again in 1967 – this time on her own merits, as the banshee wife in the vociferous Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
By 1968, the shrieking, violet-eyed Taylor and her then husband, Richard Burton – whom she would go on to divorce, twice – had become larger than life itself. Looking for a project that would match their expected decibel levels, the two returned to Italy – the scene of their original sins – with a Tennessee Williams adaptation: Boom!
Based on Williams’ 1963 play The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, and directed by the blacklisted art film-maker Joseph Losey, Boom! stars Taylor as moribund glamour puss Flora “Sissy” Goforth. At death’s door and dictating her memoirs, the wealthy widow lives in isolation on her namesake island. That is until a man named Christopher Flanders (Burton) arrives. Known elsewhere as “the Angel of Death”, Flanders has a habit of conveniently appearing at stately homes before the undertaker.
Even so, it’s never totally clear who is most in danger on Isola Goforth. As she hurls abuse at her staff and throws anything that displeases her off the side of the cliff, it becomes apparent the viperous Sissy is no sitting duck. “They say she’s a bitch to approach,” Flanders is warned before his arrival, only to be mauled by a pack of dogs moments later.
Things quickly take a surreal turn when Burton’s character, whose clothes are in tatters, is re-dressed in a samurai kimono with an accompanying sword. This is to be his attire during his stay as the in-house death doula. Meanwhile, the exceedingly stylish Sissy sports a collection of kaftans and capes, as well as one very memorable headpiece resembling a white sea urchin. “It’s a kabuki costume!” she exclaims, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
It’s moments like these that earn Boom! its so-bad-it’s-good status, an insult I refuse wholeheartedly. Boom! is so good, it’s great – one of the few Taylor-Burton films that rises to the extremes of their love affair. While it’s hardly love at first sight for Sissy and her houseguest Christopher, the two are helpless to resist their strange and sudden chemistry. The same undeniable chemistry once brought about Taylor and Burton’s so-called “erotic vagrancy” in Rome on the set of Cleopatra; it seems Taylor was destined to play an empress hellbent on staging her own death again and again.
Rife with island horrors and sexual paranoia, Boom! is best understood as the spiritual sequel to Williams’ earlier work Suddenly Last Summer, the film adaptation of which featured Taylor alongside Katharine Hepburn. In Boom! Hepburn was originally asked to play the gossip-prone Witch of Capri, Sissy’s shrewd frenemy who visits her villa for overdressed dinner parties and bad-mouthing. Insulted by the unflattering offer, Hepburn turned the role down and was replaced by Noël Coward.
Thoroughly ridiculed upon its release, Williams was right to defend Boom! He considered it to be the best movie adaptation of any one of his plays, assured it would eventually be received with acclaim. And so it did, with none other than the great apostle of poor taste, the director John Waters, rightly crowning Boom! “the best failed art movie ever made”, even paying direct homage with his berserk 1981 Sirkian family drama Polyester.
Set against the ultramarine backdrop of the Mediterranean Sea and the towering limestone cliffs of Capo Caccia, Sardinia, it’s the blazing sun that catches fire with Williams’s frenzied script. Boom! is a blinding fever dream that repeatedly boils over into complete madness.
Madness also plagued the production of the film. After trying to add the villa to their property portfolio, Taylor and Burton had to be reminded that the all-white home, which cost about $500,000 to build, was but a film set, without a rooftop, electricity or plumbing.
Watching Boom!, with its sometimes silly bromides about life (“Boom! The shock of each moment of still being alive”), there is a feeling of watching something dangerously close to death, insistent on sticking around.
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