By 1973, Elizabeth Taylor's personal life and career were a mess. Hollywood had ushered in a new wave of young directors and emotionally accessible actors that prized naturalism, rendering the aging and puffy Taylor an uptight has-been. What's more, her private life lived largely in headlines had become a throwback bore to a younger generation of moviegoers. Married to her fifth husband, Richard Burton, their union was fizzling fast by '73 and would end the following year. (They would remarry in '75 and divorce again in '76.)
Most important, perhaps, between 1968 and '79, Taylor's flurry of films wound be one forgettable flop after the next. And yet, through it all, Taylor remained one of the greatest dramatic actors of her generation. Fully aware of her predicament and plagued by health issues and chronic pain, Taylor, 41 at the time, agreed to star in The Driver's Seat, also known as Identikit. A hail-Mary film made in Italy and released in 1974, the seldom-seen film is my favorite from her tailspin period. I was overjoyed to find it in full at YouTube.
The screenplay and direction challenged Taylor to be completely exposed, to embrace her inner diva and tear it down at the same time. Shot up close, the film features Taylor as an unhinged figure who flies from her home in London to Rome to find a lover who will be willing to kill her. As we watch Taylor's face just feet from the camera lens in many scenes, we are able to marvel at her stunning beauty and study her wear and tear. It's a film of both desperation and pure intimacy and art. Taylor plays the role with breathtaking authority, since she certainly could relate to the character's pomposity and self-destruction. Her emotions careen between fiction and reality.
Directed by Giuseppe Patroni Griffi from a Muriel Spark novel, The Driver's Seat includes a suitably strange and brief cameo by Andy Warhol as an English lord. According to David Drew's Elizabeth Taylor: The Lady, The Lover, The Legend, Warhol was furtively angling for an exclusive for his Interview magazine. That is, until Taylor heard a tape recorder whirring in his coat pocket and banished him.
Don't try to follow the plot or dialogue. Two narratives are taking place at once—Taylor's hypnotic destruction from her perspective and the police investigation, which seems to have been added later and could have been cut entirely. Neither matters much. Just watch Taylor in free-fall as she steps into a complex character, handles her lines with cool psychotic anguish and delivers a performance that is more rewarding than critics gave her credit for at the time. The direction also is a strange delight, ranging from icy to torrid.
Here's The Driver's Seat, with a terrific neo-classical piano piece by Franco Mannino...
Note: For observant Taylor fans, The Driver's Seat makes a playful reference to The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954), in which Taylor also plays an American woman deteriorating emotionally in Europe. In the film, she tells Van Johnson she'll be fine finding her way home alone, that she's quite good at finding a taxi. Then she proceeds to yell out "Taxi!" without success. In The Driver's Seat, she again yells out "Taxi" and has trouble finding a cab. You'll find the scene here at 25:50...
