The Sandpiper (Filmways Pictures, Venice Productions, MGM, filmed 1964, released 1965)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, August 9) Turner Classic Movies did one of their all-day “Summer Under the Stars” tributes to Elizabeth Taylor, and as part of it they showed the film I watched last night: The Sandpiper, made in 1964 and released in 1965 as the third of the 11 movies that co-starred Elizabeth Taylor and her fifth husband, Richard Burton. They famously met in 1962 on the set of her film Cleopatra, which cast Liz in the title role, Rex Harrison as Julius Caesar, and Burton as Mark Antony. They instantly started an affair even though they were both married to other people – Taylor to Eddie Fisher (whom she’d started dating after the death of husband number three, Mike Todd, and pulled away from his first wife, Debbie Reynolds) and Burton to Sybil Williams. So for their third film together (their second was The V.I.P.’s, 1963) producer Martin Ransohoff, who also wrote the original story, came up with the idea of casting two real-life adulterers (though by 1964 they’d divorced their previous spouses and married each other) in a story about adultery. To his credit, Ransohoff hired two formerly blacklisted screenwriters, Dalton Trumbo and Michael Wilson, to turn his story into a shooting script, but that might have been a mistake because Trumbo and Wilson larded a relatively simple story of sin and quasi-redemption with all too many Biblical asides and feints at a critique of capitalism. After Ransohoff’s first choice as a director, William Wyler, turned it down, he hired Vincente Minnelli, who had worked with Taylor before when she was just becoming an adult in the films Father of the Bride (1950) and its sequel, Father’s Little Dividend (1951). The Sandpiper has been called Minnelli’s worst film, which it wasn’t – there were worse ones to come, like On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970) and A Matter of Time (1976), in which Minnelli directed his and Judy Garland’s daughter Liza in a thoroughly wretched and old-fashioned story about a middle-aged movie star who flashes back and relives her past.

In The Sandpiper, Laura Reynolds (Elizabeth Taylor) is a free-spirited young woman living off the coast of Big Sur, California, hanging out with a crowd of arty types between the Beatnik and Hippie eras, and raising a young son, Danny (Morgan Mason, real-life son of actor James Mason and husband of rock singer Belinda Carlisle), whom she’s home-schooling before home-schooling was acknowledged and made legal. Laura makes her living painting and selling anodyne watercolors, but saves her true creativity for a series of spectacular symbolist oils that she can’t sell. Alas, Danny gets in trouble with the law when he somehow acquires a high-powered hunting rifle and takes a shot at a young deer. (Ironically, this is presented in the movie as a symbol of his free-spirited independence, while today – at least in most sane circles – this would be considered an indication that he was potentially a mass murderer.) He misses, thank goodness, but he’s hauled before the stern Judge Thompson (veteran character actor Torin Thatcher), who insists that Danny be taken away from his mother’s custody and installed as a boarding student at the notoriously strict San Simeon Episcopal boys’ school. The school is run by Dr. Edward Hewitt (Richard Burton), a tough, no-nonsense headmaster, whose wife Claire (Eva Marie Saint, so I was watching her for the second night in a row, after 36 Hours, in a movie for which she was horrendously overqualified) is on campus as a sort-of go-fer and all-around assistant. We learn Dr. Hewitt is morally compromised even before he meets Laura when he’s told that the boy he’s about to flunk out is the son of a major donor, and he quotes $2,000 as the size of the donation he’s expecting to ignore the boy’s lousy grades and keep him in the school.

For the first 40 minutes or so The Sandpiper is actually a pretty close reworking of Auntie Mame, with Taylor in the Rosalind Russell role and Burton in Fred Clark’s role as the nasty authority figure who’s trying to take control of a boy (her nephew in Auntie Mame, her son here) from the rambunctious, free-spirited woman who has him now. But the Ransohoff-Trumbo-Wilson script totally lacks the light-hearted wit and genuine emotion Patrick Dennis, Betty Comden and Adolph Green brought to Auntie Mame. The mutual lust between Dr, Hewitt and Laura Reynolds starts at a low simmer when Hewitt begins inventing excuses to visit Laura at her beachfront home (which looked so precarious and sloppily constructed I kept expecting to hear she’d built it herself), ostensibly to discuss the progress of her son. Among the movie’s more bizarre props is a (presumably) anatomically correct statue of Laura Reynolds, carved out of redwood by her current boyfriend, sculptor Cos Erickson (Charles Bronson, of all people, though under his original name Charles Buchinsky he’d previously played a sculptor in the 1953 film House of Wax). The real sculptor was local artist Edmund Kara, whose girlfriend, jazz singer Stella Brooks, posed for it, though the studio took a plaster cast of Elizabeth Taylor’s face and gave it to Kara to help him make the statue look like her. MGM produced a 10-minute featurette on the making of the statue that mentioned that after it was finished, it had to be shipped to France because both Burton and Taylor were British nationals, and that limited the number of days they could work in the U.S. without being subjected to American income tax. During one of his visits to Laura’s home, Hewitt bursts out and admits, “I want you! I want you!” The two become lovers not long after that and do a lot of canoodling in and around the spectacular Big Sur beaches (where much of the film was shot and where a real-life restaurant called Nepenthe, after the “drug of forgetfulness” in Greek mythology, was used), though with the old Production Code still nominally in force their first scene together as an adulterous couple had to be filmed decorously. We see Burton and Taylor in bed together, fully clothed, and then we cut to a shot taking place the next morning with Taylor as Laura at first wondering if Hewitt slipped out during the night, then finding him making himself coffee in her kitchen and tying his tie to prepare to go to work.

Along the way we get bits and pieces of Laura’s backstory; she was 17 when she met Danny’s father, who got her pregnant and wanted to marry her. She refused – she explains, “I was in love with him, but I didn’t love him,” and she wasn’t looking forward to waking up in the morning when they were both middle-aged and seeing his face in bed as she regained consciousness – and so her parents offered to get her an abortion. This was at a time when abortion was still illegal in all 50 U.S. states (what today’s Republicans think of as “the good old days,” though ironically the first break in that total nationwide ban on abortion was passed in California in 1967 and signed into law by a Right-wing icon, then-Governor Ronald Reagan), but Laura refused because she actually wanted the child. Then her folks said she could move back in with her and have the baby there, but she refused that, too, because she didn’t want the sense of shame she’d have got big-time from being an unwed mother still living with her parents. Instead she moved to California and for a while became the mistress of Walter Robinson (Tom Drake, who’d worked for Minnelli before as Judy Garland’s “boy next door” boyfriend in Meet Me in St. Louis), with whom she spent two years. She let him pay her way through art school but then dumped him after two years and moved to Big Sur with her son. Alas, Walter is also a major donor to San Simeon’s school and he’s hanging around there not only to talk business with Dr. Hewitt but also to get back into Laura’s ample pants. Meanwhile, Dr. Hewitt traces Laura out to a wild (or as wild as filmmakers could make it in 1964) night at Nepenthe, which takes place under a crudely assembled driftwood sculpture that looks like they’re about to start Burning Man 22 years early, where he and Cos (ya remember Cos?) get into a fight (Richard Burton and Charles Bronson, action heroes!) over Laura’s dubious affections.

Hendricks is the first one from Hewitt’s outwardly respectable life to catch them when he sees the two dining together in a non-countercultural restaurant and holding hands across the table. Ultimately Hewitt and his wife Claire (ya remember Claire?) confront each other while they’re in Hewitt’s 1965 Ford Fairlane station wagon (a car whose very plainness symbolizes Hewitt’s character). He confesses to his wife that he’s been having extra-relational activities – “We made love – even in motels, God help me!” (a bit of a surprise since everything actually or potentially sexual we’ve seen between Hewitt and Laura has taken place either at her home or on the beach in front of it, nowhere near a motel) – and she responds in the over-the-top fashion of a Lifetime wife when she learns that her husband has been cuckolding her. She demands that she stop the car, she gets out in the middle of nowhere, and when they finally make it home together she refuses to sleep with him anymore, and since San Simeon is a live-work space for both of them he’s reduced to sleeping in the school’s library. Thanks to Hewitt’s buying a painting of hers for $100 Laura has finally started to get a name for herself as an artist, and she’s looking forward to moving to San Francisco, getting an apartment and studio, and raising Danny there. But Danny likes it at San Simeon and in particular likes having friends his own age. The film’s climax occurs at the school’s end-of-the-year ceremony, in which Hewitt announces his resignation as headmaster, also announces that he’s converted the fund he was raising for a new school chapel into a scholarship fund so students from poor economic backgrounds can attend (earlier Laura had submitted designs for the stained-glass windows of the new chapel, Hewitt had rejected them, and Laura had burned them – much like Brahms, who’s known to have composed four times as much music as survives because he was so fiercely self-critical he destroyed anything that didn’t live up to his standards), and in the end he walks out on both Claire and Laura and goes his own way heaven knows where in the kind of alienated cop-out that became a maddening movie cliché in the late 1960’s.

The Sandpiper – the title comes from a wounded bird Laura finds at the beginning of the film, puts a splint made from a drinking straw on its broken leg, and takes care of until it can once again fly free – is the sort of film Dwight Macdonald called “the Bad Good Movie,” one which starts out to make high-flying pronouncements about the Human Condition and ends up as just another Hollywood potboiler, with Richard Burton in particular making thunderous statements about the guilt he feels over having an affair that reminded me of his similar pronouncements over a decade earlier in The Robe (1953). It also reminded me of Harry and Michael Medved’s declaration of Richard Burton as the worst actor of all time in their book The Golden Turkey Awards (1979), in particular their citation of Burton’s “ability to make even the most trivial lines of dialogue sound as if they were painfully ripped from his inner regions.” (The Medveds also named Raquel Welch, whom my husband Charles and I had just watched two nights before in Kansas City Bomber, the worst actress of all time.) Burton’s paroxysms of guilt expressed through tightly clenched teeth also reminded me of Mike Nichols’s and Elaine May’s famous comedy routine, “Adultery – It’s Coming Back” (more likely it never left), in which the American adulterous couple talk endlessly about their own guilt feelings and the man finally blurts out, “You know how I feel? If I hadn’t already paid for the room, I’d say let’s forget about the whole thing!” About the only good thing that came out of The Sandpiper was “The Shadow of Your Smile,” a lovely theme song with music by Johnny Mandel and lyrics by Paul Francis Webster (who also worked on great songs like Duke Ellington’s “I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good” and campily terrible ones like the 1960’s Spider-Man theme) that won the Academy Award for Best Original Song and stayed on the charts for years.