Plantiana Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

Baseshment I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

Allison Davies The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Jakoba True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

Bob-1914 The Sandpiper is interesting for its buffoonish take on the art and counter cultures of the 1960's. Taylor plays a struggling iconoclastic painter who somehow manages to live in the coolest place on earth, a designer home hanging off the cliffs of Big Sir with a view of the Pacific. Charles Bronson plays a beatnik sculptor, right. And they all hang out with a cool black guy artist, played by James Edwards. Burton is the Dr. Rev. Edward Hewitt, a cleric who falls in love with Taylors' breasts. The artwork sucks. The portrait of Taylor that the Bronson character sculpts is atrocious. She looks like she's straining on the toilet. The real artist, Edmund Kara, is a great sculptor but this piece is a mess. Taylor's endless paintings of the symbolic "sandpiper" also suck. They were painted by Elizabeth Duquette, the socialite wife of Tony Duquette, the great designer. They lack even rudimentary rendering ability; no sense of form, a mess of individual feathers that add up to neither a feeling of the whole nor a celebration of pattern, they're clumsy. Only a Hollywood moron with money would buy this junk. On the upside, the music is lush and the scenery sublime.

JLRMovieReviews Elizabeth Taylor is a free spirit trying to teach her son there's more to life than school, rules, and living like the rest do. There's beauty, nature, and the world at his feet. Enter Richard Burton, who's an Epsicopalian priest at a school. He is talked into letting Elizabeth's son enter the school, because her unorthodox ways are not conducive to the boy growing up and being a part of society. So says some nosy somebody, who has influence. She is against the idea, but ultimately her son goes to the school after some minor scuffle. When Richard becomes fixated on this beautiful creature with her novel ideas about life and people, he finds excuses to see her, despite the fact he is married to Eva Marie Saint. One thing obviously leads to another. I have always found this to be a very beautifully realized film. I guess I'm susceptible to the ocean, art, and the earthy qualities that this kind of film captures, but I think I could go so far to say that this is one of my favorite films of Ms. Taylor's. It may not be that much in the way of film-making or that important at all, but this is very much a feeling type of film, that lets you, the viewer, get lost in her world completely, living just off Big Sur in California. Everything is so beautiful. Have I used that word enough? If you don't like this review or this film, then leave me be with Ms. Taylor as we let a sandpiper fly when he wants to....

Ed Uyeshima The enormity of Elizabeth Taylor's breasts in this ridiculous 1965 sudser overshadows (pardon the pun) even the grandeur of Big Sur captured nicely by Milton R. Krasner's expert cinematography. She was at the height of her notoriety as a Hollywood star enflamed by the media for her highly publicized affair with and marriage to Richard Burton, who looks understandably embarrassed as her co-star, probably the least of their big-screen couplings back in the 1960's. Consider that "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" was their next film. Taylor is hilariously miscast as beatnik artist Laura Reynolds, a free-spirit mother to ten-year-old Danny. They live a solitary life in a striking home overlooking the rugged Pacific coast. How she can afford such prime real estate on just her paintings is one of many suspensions of belief the movie asks of the undemanding viewer.The threadbare plot, written by four screenwriters including the legendary Dalton Trumbo, has Danny being sent to a local Episcopal boarding school for killing a deer out of curiosity. The pompous headmaster is Dr. Edward Hewitt, who feels constantly cheapened by his glad-handing efforts to raise funds to maintain the school and build a new chapel. His repressed wife Claire teaches there, and in no time, Danny starts to enjoy school and the company of the other students. Meanwhile, Laura is initially resentful of Hewitt's academic approach, but of course, given this is Taylor and Burton in their prime, they fall quickly into a torrid love affair. Of course, Hewitt grows guilty for his uncontrollable passion and confesses to his wife. This leads to a rather absurd but inevitable conclusion. The film's director is surprisingly VIncente Minnelli who can't seem to do anything intelligent with the limp script handed to him and lets his two stars flail excessively on screen. With her zaftig figure and designer outfits, Taylor simply looks disengaged, while Burton tries to inject some dignity to a basically unsympathetic character but to no avail.Poor Eva Marie Saint is left stranded by Claire's frigidity and ignorance. Charles Bronson has a few silly scenes as a sarcastic bohemian sculptor, while Robert Webber has his standard role of a wealthy cad lusting after Laura. Morgan Mason plays Danny insipidly, though interestingly enough, he would grow up to become Reagan's Chief of Protocol and marry Belinda Carlisle of the Go-Go's. Much of the dialogue is painfully bad with a lot of counter-culture talk that sounds hopelessly pretentious out of Taylor's mouth, yet for all its flaws, the film is utterly watchable as a trash wallow. The familiar Johnny Mandel song, "The Shadow of Your Smile", comes from this movie and plays over the opening and end credits. The 2006 DVD contains two vintage featurettes: "The Big Sur", narrated by Burton, about the challenges of filming in the area, and "A Statue for The Sandpiper", featuring the artist who carved the redwood statue of the bodacious Taylor, used in the film.

highwaytourist This film was designed to take advantage of public curiosity about the recent marriage of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, who were kind of the Bragelina of the 1960's. Their star power were enough to make this picture a hit at the box office. Here, Taylor plays a free-spirited beatnik artist and single mother. She lives on the beach in a glamorous "shack" and makes a living as an artist while raising her son. Very touching. Her son, played by Morgan Mason, gets into trouble and winds up being sent to a religious boarding school. The school is run by the Reverend Richard Burton, along with his pretty and supportive but staid wife, Eva Marie Saint. Well, Burton is going through a mid-life crisis and it comes to fruition when he first meets Taylor and is taken by her heavy make-up and "look at my breasts" wardrobes. So he visits her home to help her keep tabs on her son's progress at school and meets some of her beatnik friends, including Charles Bronson, absurdly cast as a hippie sculptor. What happens then? Well, after taking forever to set up the story, Taylor and Burton fall in love and have an affair, to the surprise of no one. In the process, we are treated to the majestic Big Sur beaches and beautiful music, including the Oscar-winning theme song "The Shadow of Your Smile." In fact, the music and seascapes are more interesting than the story and characters, who just talk everything to death while the story drags on in predictable fashion. This would have been a better coffee table book than motion picture. My recommendation? Watch the opening credits and closing credits, which are by far the best parts of the movie.