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The Burton's Slide into Box Office Poison

the masked reviewer | Boston, MA | 12/25/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Grahame Greene's THE COMEDIANS proved to be the first Richard Burton - Elizabeth Taylor collaboration that lost money at the box office. Much was made of the fact that Burton received top-billing for the first time, and that Taylor took half her usual one million dollar salary to stay with Burton. (Understandably, due to Richard's notorious womanizing, Taylor was a tad nervous about letting original choice Sophia Loren take the role).



Greene didn't write much of a woman's role into his novel but that changed fast when the Burtons bought the property. The lady in the book is the mistress of a broken-down Haitian hotel owner who broods about politics and religion and, (mostly), his mistress. This is because he hardly ever gets to see her. But in the movie he (Burton, that is) sees a lot more of her because, baby, when you're paying Liz Taylor's salary you really use her in your movie.



But both Burton and Taylor are quite lost in all of the plot's skullduggery. Taylor, supposedly playing a German (We defy anyone to place that accent before she identifies it), exists in the film only to provide torment for Burton. In the novel, the mistress is important mainly in the man's own mind. She represents his last chance at love, and it's pretty clear she's not going to make it much of a chance. She's married to German ambassador Peter Ustinov, has a son she loves and is also rather attracted to Major Alec Guinness, a dashing mercenary soldier and arms peddler. Burton fares slightly better, but he's largely enervated, developing that patented far-off stare that he would use increasingly in his later movies (perhaps the result of his increasing alcoholism). In the novel, the hotel owner broods and broods. In the movie, he broods a lot but it's harder to understand why, since Liz pops up every 10 minutes or so and he can hardly find time most days to get his brooding properly brooded. The mistress' role has been expanded in the movie without exactly being deepened; most of the Taylor-Burton scenes consist of Taylor looking ravishing while Burton broods and whispers things to his tie knot. (Who knows what he's whispering? Maybe it's dialog.) These scenes are alternated with long, very wordy discussions about corrupt politics in Haiti, held by various combinations of Burton, Miss Taylor, Ustinov, Guinness and revolutionary Haitian doctor James Earl Jones. Sometimes Liz gets tired of talking and plays cards with Guinness. It's gin rummy, which Brian Keith taught her to play in REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE while Marlon Brando was mumbling into his tie knot. (You have to pass the time somehow.)



Fortunately, there are some hilarious scenes involving Vegetarian candidate for U.S. President Paul Ford and his wife (a brilliant Lillian Gish). And the atmosphere of the Caribbean is invoked convincingly, if to no particular purpose. Still, if scientists are ever looking for a way to manage time -- not just to travel through it, but to really s-l-o-w it down -- all they have to do is thread up a reel of THE COMEDIANS and watch astonished as the minutes become millennia. As for the Burtons, they would go on to make several more films together, each one making less money than the last until they finished off the decade largely considered unemployable as a screen team.

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