Surf (film)

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Movie
German title surf
Original title Boom; Boom!
Country of production Great Britain
original language English
Publishing year 1968
length 139 minutes
Rod
Director Joseph Losey
script Tennessee Williams , based on its own play
production John Heyman , Norman Priggen for John Heyman Productions, Moon Lake, Universal Pictures , World Film Services
music John Barry
camera Douglas Slocombe
cut Reginald Beck
occupation

Surf is a British feature film ( avant-garde film ) directed by Joseph Losey from 1968. The film is an adaptation of the 1963 play The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore by Tennessee Williams .

action

The place of action is an island in the Mediterranean Sea, time the present. Flora Goforth is a six-time widowed, extremely wealthy, middle-aged writer who retreats with her service staff to her private island every summer. Since she is going to die, she dictates her memoir to her secretary Blackie this summer - vulgarly cursing, drinking liquor, dropping pills and begging for injections.

This situation is interrupted by the arrival of the aging poet Chris Flanders, who has the bizarre habit of paying a visit to rich women who are dying like an angel of death in order to pamper them with his presence and in return to their house bar and their jewels. Flora has only one friend, the "Witch of Capri", a gossip-loving homosexual who informs her about Chris' motives and warns her against him. Flora, however, tolerates the intruder, who both repels and attracts her, and allows him to move into one of the guest houses.

As her health deteriorates, Flora becomes more and more used to his presence. She is actually impatiently awaiting death, but the memoirs are not yet finished, and to delay him, she gives Chris nothing to eat and argues with him. Only when the end can no longer be stopped does she invite him into her bedroom, where she collapses. While he is preparing her to die, he takes her precious ring, which he throws into the sea after her death, which is only hinted at in the film.

Production and reception

Simone Signoret and Sean Connery were initially scheduled for the leading roles, but both of them canceled and were then replaced by Taylor and Burton. The Technicolor film cost an estimated $ 10 million to make. The shooting took place in Sardinia and Rome .

The film premiered in the US on May 26, 1968 and in the UK in October 1968. It was initially called Boom and later, when it didn't do well in the cinema, it was in Boom! renamed. In the US it grossed 2 million dollars by 1969, making it the first film with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton that did not generate its production costs. The press, who didn't know what to do with the film's unusual imagery, reacted extremely negatively. He was enthusiastically defended, however, by John Waters , who called the surf as the best failed art movie ever ("the best failed art film of all time") and has pointed out, among other things, that the role of Flora was "the ultimate drag queen role" be. In fact, the role in the stage version was repeated with male actors - in the 1990s e.g. B. with Rupert Everett  - occupied.

Even the author Tennessee Williams later found that this film was the most successful of all adaptations of his works.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sam Kashner, Nancy Schoenberger: Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century , Harper-Collins, 2010, p. 212