BEFORE: Of course, it's an easy leap from Paul Newman to Elizabeth Taylor, via "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof". And I'm back in New York, even though TCM decided to stay in Paris another day...
Another clear schedule for me today, I've got no interested in "Marie Antoinette", "The Story of Louis Pasteur", or "The Life of Emile Zola". I could pick up "An American In Paris", but outside of "Singin' in the Rain", I'm not that much of a Gene Kelly fan. Gonna pass on "Joan of Arc", "The Razor's Edge" and "The Last Metro" too, which frees me up to record last year's film "Win Win" today, to put on a DVD with another Paul Giamatti film, "Barney's Version".
THE PLOT: The romantic life of a fashionable Manhattan beauty who's part model, part call-girl--and all man-trap.
AFTER: I didn't make a typo in the title of this film - it's "BUtterfield 8", which stands for a phone exchange in Manhattan's Upper West Side. I never really understood the way phones used to work - you see characters in old films pick up the phone and ask the operator for "CLEarview 5279" or something like that. The first few letters stand for numbers, obviously - but why is the word "Butterfield" and not just "Butter"? The capitalized BU plus the 8 stands for "288" - but where are the other numbers? Someone's phone number can't just be 3 digits long, not in 1960!
Which reminds me - in "The Apartment", Jack Lemmon's character asked the operator if he could make a "person-to-person" call - what was that? Aren't all phone calls from one person to another person? And by talking to the operator, didn't that make it NOT a person-to-person call? Why didn't he just dial the number directly? I suppose I should research this...
Ah, a "person-to-person" call is when the operator helped make a call to a specific person at a number, and if that person wasn't there, there was no charge for the call. But what if another person who answered lied and pretended to be that person? And didn't people used to get free long-distance calls when traveling by doing this and asking for a phony name, thus sending a free message that they'd arrived at their destination safely? It was a flawed system, that's all I'm sayin'.
Anyway, this picks up on this week's loose theme of infidelity, as also seen in "The Apartment" and "The Seven Year Itch". The focus here is on a call girl, which is apparently somewhat different from a prostitute, at least to some degree. Gloria (Liz Taylor) is a part-time model also, and the two professions seem to dovetail nicely, as she's paid to wear a particular dress out at certain clubs, in order to be seen and photographed, and I guess this sells dresses somehow.
But things take a turn when one of her clients gets involved emotionally, since he's got a distant socialite wife who's off taking care of her mother. He wants more from Gloria than she's usually prepared to give, which in turn gives her unrealistic expectations about where this relationship is going, and forces her to confront the reality of the career track she's on.
The Hollywood convention then demands that the wife returns, and of course she's going to figure out what her husband's been up to, or she already knows on some level, even an unconscious one, or maybe he'll be wracked with guilt, or perhaps all of the above. Either way, once the infidelity train has been set in motion, it's bound to run off the tracks at some point.
So the film works as another cautionary tale, but other than that, I found it pretty pointless. My friend Andy took issue with the film "The Seven Year Itch" - if Tom Ewell's character was so concerned about cheating on his wife, why didn't he just NOT do that? Sure, that's easy to say - but here, as there, it's part of the premise. This film begins the morning after the affair has been consummated, so there's no way around it.
OK, so why not just stop seeing the call girl? Well, obviously our married man here was too emotionally involved - calling it "love" seems a bit outrageous, so was he just looking for an outlet, an escape from his marriage? He couldn't have been too invested in the marriage if he cheated, or was the situation more complicated than it seemed? Unfortunately there's not much clarification here, even the film's ending is not much of a resolution in this regard.
Also starring Laurence Harvey, Eddie Fisher, Dina Merrill, and Susan Oliver.
RATING: 3 out of 10 cigarettes (smoked inside stores, and even on a train!)
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