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Excellent but underrated film

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

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.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

If you are thinking this may be a disaster movie such as the (1972) The Poseidon Adventure, (1974) The Towering Inferno, and/or (1997) The Titanic, you would be wrong. The V.I.P.s is a soap opera that outlines four (4) vignettes that take place at a London airport that has these interesting passengers grounded unexpectedly as follows:1. Love Triangle Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and Louis Jourdan are the three (3) figures with Richard Burton being the wealthy tycoon who ignores his wife Elizabeth Taylor so she falls "out of love" with Richard and into the charming hands by default of the addicted gambler and male gigolo Louis Jourdan with the end of their respective relationships being delivered via the exchange of two (2) letters.2. Save my corporation Rod Taylor and Maggie Smith are in a desperate battle to save Rod's tractor manufacturing corporation from an imminent takeover bid. Maggie who plays Rod's able executive assistant though is more interested in saving Rod's heart than his bank account.3. Save my estate Margaret Rutherford (best known for her role as Agatha Christie's female sleuth Miss Jane Marple) is attempting to board her flight from London to Florida to take a meaningless job in an effort to save her families estate and especially her gaudy and outdated castle.4. Save my film production company Orson Welles and his latest film star Elsa Martinelli seem to have nothing going for them but smoke and mirrors as the famed film director and wannabe film star respectively. So Orson has to be out of London and in Switzerland to avoid the taxman, but since their flight is delayed he and his accountant come up with an alternative plan once again to save his film production company.Although this will never be a film classic the all star cast will keep you interested in their separate stories and more importantly how their stories end. I give the film a decent 6 out of 10 rating. No harm, no foul.

Seven years before "Airport," there was this similarly laid out, lush MGM soap, which wasn't produced by Ross Hunter but looks like it could have been. The stars, the fashions, the mid-century-modern sets, the Miklos Rosza themes grinding and repeating in the background, all speak to a more innocent, more optimistic time. And best of all, while Hunter had only Perlberg and Seaton to bring Arthur Hailey's novel to the screen, MGM had the super-literate, super-crafty Terrence Rattigan to provide his own original story, expertly plotted out to afford a plethora of wide-screen star-gazing. Elizabeth Taylor, resplendent in St. Laurent, is about to leave Richard Burton for lounge lizard Louis Jourdan, but their plane is fogged in at Heathrow and Burton catches up to them, allowing for some civilized sniping between the two men, neither of whom seems good enough for her. Meantime, Dino di Laurentiis-like producer Orson Welles has to be out of Britain by midnight to escape some tax burdens; duchess Margaret Rutherford is headed unhappily to a new job in Florida to pay expenses for her Brighton mansion; and tractor maker Rod Taylor, subject to a hostile takeover, needs 150,000 pounds to cover a bad check, in which he's ably assisted by his plain-Jane secretary, Maggie Smith (all Janes should be this plain). Rattigan's epigrammatic screenplay darts dazzlingly between the four story lines, and he's instinctively fair-minded; nobody's all good or all bad, and even Linda Christian, as Rod Taylor's shallow girlfriend, isn't entirely reprehensible. Everybody's great fun to watch, and interesting people like Michael Hordern and Robert Coote and David Frost can be glimpsed in supporting roles, but the movie really belongs to the two Maggies. Rutherford picked up a supporting Oscar for playing essentially what she'd been playing for the previous 25 years, but who deserved it more, and she's not only pricelessly funny but unexpectedly touching. And Smith, silently loving her boss Rod Taylor (and who wouldn't), effortlessly steals a particularly good scene from Burton, bringing on the third act and walking off with the rest of the movie. Deep it isn't, and Rosza's themes feel a little obvious (I grew to hate that cutesy-English strain underlying every Rutherford scene), but what a luxuriously entertaining ride. That the prime storyline is based on Rattigan's own observation of the Vivien Leigh-Laurence Olivier-Peter Finch triangle being played out at the airport a few years before only adds to our sumptuous enjoyment.

Lush, plush, silly but fun. Everyone is terribly rich and terribly troubled but of course everything is happily resolved in just two hours, if you like that sort of thing this is for you. Liz and Dick are the featured couple of course but theirs really isn't the most compelling vignette. Still Elizabeth looks great and Burton is appropriately intense. Orson Welles is aboard in a plot that doesn't go anywhere until the end but he adds an amusing performance to the film so it isn't that much of an intrusion. The two best bits belong to Rod Taylor and a very young Maggie Smith, who is excellent-she gives the film's second best performance but the absolute standout is Margaret Rutherford in an Oscar winning part as a dotty but oddly touching Duchess who has to go to work to save her home. She's utterly brilliant, the very definition of what a supporting performance should add to a film.

Who needs a TV movie about Hollywood's greatest screen team when you have the real thing? Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, fresh from making headlines in Rome on "Cleopatra", quickly followed that up with this soapy women's picture about a business tycoon's obsession with his estranged wife, and the love a secretary has for her boss that results in her saving his business from a takeover. Elizabeth Taylor tones down the drama from her series of successful potboilers of the late 1950's and early 60's ("Cat on a Hot Tin Roof", "Suddenly Last Summer", her Oscar winning performance in the silly "Butterfield 8") while Burton is excellent as her demanding husband whose obsession moves between violence and tenderness. Playing the role that Burton had been portraying in real life ("the other man"), Louis Jourdan is the man Taylor is planning to marry once she gets rid of her unwanted husband. Pretty ironic considering the five years of scandal that Taylor had been undergoing since the Debbie/Eddie scandal.Rod Taylor seems to be utilizing an Australian accent to his role of a man on the verge of loosing his business while his shy but efficient secretary (Maggie Smith) quietly thinks of a way to save the day. Smith, rising slowly to stardom from here on in, had been around for a while in a couple of minor films, but mostly on stage. Her resemblance to Myrna Loy is quite eerie, and it is ironic that in 1976, she would be playing a parody of Loy's Nora Charles in Neil Simon's "Murder By Death". There is none of the acid tongued diva for which she became well known here, just a woman with a huge heart trying to find the courage to come out of her shell. The delightful Margaret Rutherford won the Academy Award for her performance as a chatty countess down on her luck, sort of a Marie Dressler "Dinner at Eight" grand dame that brings regalness to a delightful down-to-earth character.The weakest of the story lines is that of the film producer (Orson Welles) dealing with his star while preparing to fly to America from London. It seems to have been edited greatly, although his brief interaction with Rutherford towards the end does give it some purpose. The result is a mixed bag that audiences can enjoy even if it is far from perfect.