Watch BUtterfield 8 For Free

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

The acting in this movie is really good.

"BUtterfield 8" has to be one of the most undeserving movies to win an Academy Award (alongside the glorification of rich English people that was "Chariots of Fire"). I suppose that it's trying to make a point about child abuse, but it comes out as two hours of blandness. It truly goes overboard on trying to be a soap opera. It's well known that Elizabeth Taylor didn't like it; she and co-star Eddie Fisher (her then-husband) apparently called it "Butterball 4". The Best Actress Oscar should've gone to Shirley MacLaine for "The Apartment" (the story goes that they gave it to Liz basically as a get well present after her tracheotomy).The car chase and its shocking result turn out to be the only interesting part of the movie. If you're looking for a poodle skirt-era soaper that's at least memorable, I recommend "A Summer Place": it shows how the parents are (meanwhile, the Troy Donahue and Sandra Dee characters actually have a healthy, loving relationship but their parents insist on keeping them apart because they're "not right" for each other). As for John O'Hara, I haven't read any of his works, but a good adaptation of one of his works is the Paul Newman-Joanne Woodward movie "From the Terrace". Daniel Mann's good movies - that I've seen at least - are "Come Back, Little Sheba", "Teahouse of the August Moon" and "Willard".

Directed by Daniel Mann, with a screenplay by John Michael Hayes and Charles Schnee, this slightly above average, if dated drama earned Elizabeth Taylor her first Best Actress Oscar on her fourth nomination. The film's Color Cinematography was also nominated.Taylor plays Gloria Wandrous, a wanton girl with the titled message service that models clothes occasionally. In fact, it's an ideal job for her because she gets to frequent bars where she seemingly knows all the male clientele from past liaisons. Enter wealthy Weston Liggett (Laurence Harvey), her latest pickup who insults her by daring to leave her money. Insulted by his gesture, and because he'd ripped her clothes the night before, she leaves his apartment wearing his "home with her mother" wife's mink. Liggett's problem is that everything has been handed to him once he married Emily (Dina Merrill), whose father set him up in the company business such that he's never had a challenge. Even though he initially dismisses her as beneath him (in class), Gloria becomes his challenge.Gloria's problem is more serious, and stereotypical - her childhood was fatherless and more (revealed near its end), plus her mother (Mildred Dunnock), who refuses to acknowledge what her daughter has become, remains blissfully ignorant. However, Gloria does have an old friend, Steve (her real husband Eddie Fisher), that tolerates her even though he's engaged to Norma (Susan Oliver), who's not so understanding about her fiancé's relationship with Gloria. Mrs. Wandrous has a straightforward neighbor (Betty Field), also her best friend, who's not too shy to "call a slut, a slut". In fact, the film's best scenes are those in which Taylor's character's character is laid bare amidst snappy banter with Field's and Oliver's characters. Jeffrey Lynn plays a lawyer whose simple practice Harvey's character covets. Kay Medford plays a roadside waitress Gloria sees as her horrible future; George Voskovec plays Gloria's shrink.When Gloria tells Steve that a relative took advantage of her (sexually) at an early age, and that she liked it, it effectively convinces him to finally marry Norma. When Emily returns to her husband, it's coincidentally at the same time that Gloria realizes she has her coat and tries to return it. Weston is so messed up emotionally that he chases after Gloria, who ends up killing herself when she drives her car off an embankment. It's possible that he'll return to Emily and they'll live happily ever after.

This really is the definition of a "guilty pleasure". It is also sort of symbolic of Hollywood in the late 50's/early 60's and an ironic one in the career of Elizabeth Taylor's. Who would believe that two years after one of Hollywood's biggest scandals (with Taylor as the "other woman") she would play "the other woman" in a melodramatic soap opera? Nobody will ever accuse Laurence Harvey of being Eddie Fisher or Dina Merrill of being Debbie Reynolds, although the later is closer as her character is as noble on screen as the press made Debbie out to be in real life. Perhaps this is one of the reasons Taylor hated the film so much because it was a bit of a parallel, and maybe she was sick of the subject....But, I digress. Looking much like Maggie in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" in the opening scene wearing nothing but a slip, her character of Gloria is a slightly aging New York party girl. They say when Broadway babies say goodnight, it's early in the morning, and when Taylor wakes up, she finds everything around her in a shambles. Her dress is destroyed, she can't find a cigarette she likes, and Harvey has left her money, she later finds out, to replace the dress. Several years before the code changed, this opening scene is still pretty racy. So with no other way to get home, Taylor simply "borrows" a mink coat from Harvey's closet which is later revealed to belong to his wife Dina Merrill. Taylor is livid by the "insult". It is obvious that Taylor is not a prostitute, but she's not Donna Reed, either. (Unless it's Reed in "From Here to Eternity"!) You know right from the start that Taylor is one complex, neurotic woman. She obviously has a job (it seems wearing her outfits from some design firm around town to get them seen it appears), but for the women who know her (with the exception of naive mother Mildred Dunnock), Taylor isn't someone you leave alone with your husband. Susan Oliver is one of those women, the girlfriend of Taylor's pal, Eddie Fisher. In the early 30's, pre-code films like this were "warnings" to young ladies heading to the big city, but by 1960, the world was wise enough not to cry "danger, danger!" when showing us Gloria's plight. Taylor really isn't doing anything here she hadn't done in her recent successes, but her one key scene (unleashing her soul to Eddie Fisher about her past) is magnificent and perhaps what voters remembered when they voted her the Oscar. There is no doubt how this will end, but the lavish filming makes this truly fun to watch.I don't see this film being done in Louis B. Mayer's day at MGM, but with the permissiveness of this era, "BUtterfield 8" is not at all shocking. Harvey does what he can to make the louse of a husband likable. Some people may find Dina Merrill's wealthy socialite too good for words, but I truly empathized with her. She could have used her financial standing to be more controlling, but then she'd be labeled just another "rich bitch", which she certainly was not. I find this made her the most likable character in the film, although Kay Medford's brief scenes as the owner of the cheap road motel were filled with heart, humor and wisdom as well. Dunnock, too, was excellent as the close-eyed mother, and Betty Fields offers some amusing moments as her witty friend who pretends to hate Taylor but you know instantly actually can't help but like her. This is one of those lavish soap operas (much like "A Summer Place" and "From the Terrace") that you can't help but enjoy in spite of its triteness.

John O'Hara "still the most published short-story writer in The New Yorker's history" based his book on the true story of a high class call-girl's death in questionable circumstances in 1931.This movie version attracts low ratings and often dismissive comments: British critic Halliwell that it was "coy", others that it is "dated" or "trashy". I think that it is none of these and that such criticism is woefully naïve indeed the movie is in some ways more adult than a modern supposedly adult audience is generally willing to countenance. What interested the perhaps more savvy readers of the original story was the insight into unusual lives which otherwise would only have registered as tragic violent deaths sketchily reported in local newspapers. The movie is not great art. It is a plainly but competently told tale. It is the tale itself - these two hard-bitten characters who could have just had the fleeting dealings of wealthy man with a high class call girl but instead became the centres of each other's lives, lives of a passion and intensity neither thought they were capable of experiencing. That they at first try to maintain their respective unconcern with the feelings of others but love turns this unconcern into torture of each other leading to a spiral of emotion and pain and finally almost inevitably, tragedy. As to casting, was it a coincidence that the two leads although differing in very important respects, were not a million miles from the characters they portrayed? Laurence Harvey's second marriage was to a very wealthy widow, seventeen years his senior. Liz Taylor's beauty, animal magnetism, passion and resolute independence may have been the equal of the character she played. If the two lack chemistry as a couple (they were in fact close friends), individually each deeply understood the character they portrayed - and each other's character's character. Each even perhaps recognising the character's anxieties. I believe it shows in the great performances - Taylor's first Oscar.What makes it adult in a way modern audiences might find too adult is Gloria's revelation - what made her become what she became. The familiar story of seduction aged 13 by her mother's boyfriend would today be a simple story of violator and victim. In Butterfield 8 it is the more truthful story of her corruption and "ruin" - later to become physically promiscuous, hyper-erotic but emotionally stunted. What complements and contrasts the two extreme central characters and gave additional authenticity were the other main female characters: Gloria's unworldly mother tortured by a suspicion about her daughter she could not face. Liggett's wife - not a wealthy spoilt brat but a forgiving and loving person whose inner beauty Gloria is forced to contrast with her own inner ugliness. In their own ways almost as extreme and unusual as the two central characters. But not impossibly so.