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Created Mar 31, 2011 11:38PM PST • Edited Dec 06, 2019 06:40PM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Very Good 3.5

   Liz Taylor’s sultry star power makes BUtterfield 8 an enduring curiosity, now more legendary than ever in the wake of her death. A sophisticated story about sexual motives makes it a quality film.

   La Liz plays a sometime model who cavorts with wealthy married men until falling for one in particular. Eddie Fisher, her costar, had recently left his wife (Debbie Reynolds) for Taylor, one of many such life-reflecting-art scandals in this screen queen’s supernova career. So when her Gloria Wandrous confesses “Mama, face it: I was the slut of all time,” the through-the-looking-glass effect is considerable.

   The movie packs a punch in its brutal honesty about the underpinnings of the glamorous leading-couple’s compulsive behavior. Half a century before Mad Men and Dr. Drew, BUtterfield 8 made sex addiction understandable as well as iconically glamorous.

4. Acting

   Great 4.0

   La Liz when she was young, just 28 and oh so hot. She won her first Oscar for the role of Gloria Wandrous, and deservedly so.

   Laurence Harvey well plays her dysfunctional love interest. Though apparently the farthest thing from a heterosexual WASP in real life, he plays one here as if to the manor born.

   Eddie Fisher underwhelms as Liz’s platonic friend, notwithstanding that he was her husband and a major star himself, albeit as a singer.

   Dina Merrill jumps offscreen as a rich wife who’s grievously let down by her uptown husband.

5. Male Stars Great 4.0

6. Female Stars Really Great 4.5

7. Female Costars Great 4.0

8. Male Costars Very Good 3.5

10. Film

    Very Good 3.5

    The film shows its age yet still packs a punch. The psychological traumas that drive the lead characters to act out are particularly well explored.

11. Direction Very Good 3.5

12. Play Great 4.0

13. Music Good 3.0

14. Visuals Great 4.0

    Liz Taylor’s Gloria Wandrous drives a primo Sunbeam.

15. Content

16. Edge

    Risqué 1.9

    What was scandalous in 1960 is merely risqué now.

17. Sex Titillating 2.3

18. Violence Gentle 1.5

19. Rudeness Salty 2.0

21. Reality

    Glib 1.3

    La Liz loomed large in pop culture in no small part because her real life paralleled and intertwined with her scandalous screen characters, all of it beamed around the world by newly burgeoning electronic media. She was already on her fourth husband, Eddie Fisher, who costars in the movie, presaging how she would later costar with husband number five, Richard Burton.

    As to her character’s sex addiction, Dr. Drew opines that “most sex addicts suffered severe emotional, physical or sexual abuse while they were growing up.” Gloria Wandrous fits the bill.

    Then there’s Liz the “pre-feminist” symbol as memorably described by Camille Paglia in Slate:

    There was a long feminist attack on the Hollywood sex symbol as a sex object, a commodified thing, passive to the male gaze, and it’s such a crock! “Butterfield 8” really shows it. There’s that incredible moment in the bar where she’s wearing a svelte black dress and she and Laurence Harvey are fighting. He grabs her by the arm, and she grinds her stiletto heel into his elegant shoe. It’s male vs. female — a ferocious equal match. He’s strong, but she’s strong too! That scene shows the power and intensity of heterosexuality, with all its tensions and conflicts. It also shows how terrible current Hollywood filmmaking is — how false and manufactured sex has become. There’s no real eroticism anymore. “Butterfield 8” sizzles with eroticism, because of the psychological distance and animal attraction between male and female. The businessmen in that film are all in their uniforms, their black suits. They’re like a horde of identical and characterless myrmidons or clones. They have wealth, they have power, but they’re nothing compared to her! The film truly captures the complexities and struggles of sexuality — all of which have been lost in our period of easy gender-bending. Everything’s become so bland and boring now.

    Finally, what’s up with the title? BUtterfield 8 was a pre-area code telephone exchange for Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Think 212, only more exclusive.

22. Circumstantial Glib 1.5

23. Biological Glib 1.3

24. Physical Natural 1.0