The V.I.P.s (1963)

Good movie but grossly overrated

Don't listen to the negative reviews

Crappy film

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

This is the sort of thing Terry Rattigan could turn out between stage plays and dramatists who were stealing his thunder on the West End stage couldn't turn out to save their lives. Essentially it's froth, Grand Hotel with runways but as Grand Hotel had shown there's something about a group of top actors and/or top 'stars' rubbing stories in confined spaces that appeals to film fans and so it is here. Arguably the selling-point at the time was Burton and Taylor, newly married and already appearing in Cleopatra and the thinking at MGM was clearly while everyone and his Uncle Max wanted to get a look at the newly- weds not everyone wanted to devote four hours of their life to do so and would happily settle for a more manageable half that plus some half-decent supporting roles. Margaret Rutherford rejected Rattigan's original screenplay telling him the role lacked substance; incredibly he listened to her and re-wrote it into an Oscar winner. Though produced in an era when we 'never had it so good' it has all the hallmarks of 'depression escapist fare' and is no worse for that.

Lush, plush, silly but fun. Everyone is terribly rich and terribly troubled but of course everything is happily resolved in just two hours, if you like that sort of thing this is for you. Liz and Dick are the featured couple of course but theirs really isn't the most compelling vignette. Still Elizabeth looks great and Burton is appropriately intense. Orson Welles is aboard in a plot that doesn't go anywhere until the end but he adds an amusing performance to the film so it isn't that much of an intrusion. The two best bits belong to Rod Taylor and a very young Maggie Smith, who is excellent-she gives the film's second best performance but the absolute standout is Margaret Rutherford in an Oscar winning part as a dotty but oddly touching Duchess who has to go to work to save her home. She's utterly brilliant, the very definition of what a supporting performance should add to a film.

The ironic thing about "The V.I.P.s" is that what was the big selling point for the film at the time it was released - the relationship between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton - is by far the most tedious, ill-conceived and even embarrassing thing about it. Terence Rattigan was a very popular British playwright in the 1940's and 1950's, and his plays are undergoing a revival in England this year (2011), but the entire Liz-Dick-Louis Jourdan love triangle is soap opera at its worst. The dialog is brittle and stilted, and the actors (Burton especially) are encouraged to suffer amidst luxurious surroundings. Without spoiling the ending, I will say that the final shot, which I assume was meant to be a happy ending, reminds me of the brilliantly ambiguous final shot of "The Graduate", which was not.It's a shame, too, because the other major plot line of the film, involving an Australian businessman trying to save his company with the help of his silently adoring secretary, is actually quite well done, despite the fairly clichéd plot line. The dialog is less artificial, and the performances by Rod Taylor and particularly Maggie Smith are superb. Rod Taylor was an under-appreciated actor, I think, much better than many of the vehicles he starred in. Maggie Smith is just one of the greats - it was when, as a teenager, I saw her in this and "Hot Millions" that I fell in love with her. In fact, the most electrifying and beautifully acted (and directed) scene in the film is the short but absolutely pivotal encounter between Smith and Burton.The Orson Welles storyline about a film producer trying to get out of England to avoid taxation is, frankly, a waste of time and film. Welles is entertaining, but nothing about the scene or his performance is anything more than skin-deep.Margaret Rutherford won her Oscar as a befuddled and broke old noblewoman trying to save her ancestral home. There's nothing in her performance that she hadn't done many times, and peerlessly, before, but she is very funny and, by the end, quite touching.The production values are sky-high, and there is a platoon of first-rate British character actors (and David Frost) in support of the elegant stars, but it's all a little like biting into a beautiful chocolate and finding the center to be stale and inedible.

Though this movie is best know as a Richard Burton-Elizabeth Taylor vehicle, I wanted to watch it because it featured Margaret Rutherford's Oscar-winning role. I had previously seen the delightfully ditzy Dame (she really was a Dame) in Blithe Spirit and The Importance of Being Earnest, and she was fabulous in both, so I was eager to see her here. It was to my semi-disappointment that she was typecast for The V.I.P.s too, even if she excels at being scatterbrained. Hence her Oscar victory is more of a body of work thing, I reckon, 'coz she would've been just as deserving for the other two movies.Anyway, the movie's reminiscent of Neil Simon's works because it's about a collection of stories about a bunch of people stuck in an airport (and subsequently the airport hotel) due to weather delays. I would have to say that the personalities overshadow the characters, what with stars like Burton, Taylor, Rutherford, and the hammy Orson Welles. It was also one of Maggie Smith's first movie roles, and already she had that... Maggie Smith-ness in her. Even if I didn't get much out of the movie plot, it was lovely to watch the collection of luminaries.