Hollywood's favorite pair of mismatched lovers, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, made eleven films together, and Boom! counts among the kookiest. In veteran director Joseph Losey's adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, Taylor plays Flora Goforth, a wealthy, dying woman living in solitude in an island villa. She spends her days on a liquid diet, tossing displeasing items off the nearby cliffs, abusing her staff, and dictating her life story over an intercom system that pumps her memories and madness into every room. When a mysterious visitor (Burton) appears, she becomes convinced he will bring about her demise. Boom! is a feast of exploded art direction, extravagant costumes, and freakish rich-people behavior — it's as if the Taylor of 1963's Cleopatra stuffed her best headdresses and jewels into a suitcase and hightailed it to Capri with death hot on her heels. It never, ever lets up, and it's a joy to behold. A critical and financial failure, the film attracted supporters who were nevertheless a "quality over quantity" bunch. Tennessee Williams himself considered it one of the greatest adaptations of his work, and John Waters called it "the best failed art film ever, so genuinely beautiful and awful that it's perfect." The magic of the film even affected Taylor herself, who kept trying to purchase the island villa, only to be told repeatedly that it wasn't available (because it wasn't a real house). (Text courtesy of Chicago Film Society)

35mm IB Technicolor print from Universal

Preceded by: Elizabeth Taylor trailer reel – 10 min – 35mm

Karina Longworth is the writer, creator and host of You Must Remember This, a podcast about 20th Century Hollywood. This screening is connected to the new season of You Must Remember This, called “The Bisexuals”. Launching on September 15, "The Bisexuals," will cover the life of torch singer -- and accused murderess -- Libby Holman, and her sexually-fluid group of friends and lovers from the 1920s to the end of the 1960s, which included Montgomery Clift, Tallulah Bankhead, Josephine Baker, Nicholas Ray and many more.