1968! That year again and here's another major oddity thrown up for all to enjoy. You will read all about the 'camp classic' claims and that John Waters uses it to assess whether he can be friends with someone. All good stuff but and then some of these 'fans' sit and hoot with laughter at every line. No need to worry, this is fine. More than fine it is really good. Tennessee Williams, the writer, can be somewhat overwrought and melodramatic but here, whether due in part to director, Joseph Losey or simply to the main couple, that is not a problem here. Indeed, Noel Coward and Joanna Shimkus are good but it is the central performances of Taylor and Burton that ensure classic status upon this film. The script is not quite 'Who'se Afraid of Virginia Wolf?' but these two performances pretty much are. Taylor especially seems to revel in displaying her range and simultaneously amusing, annoying and thrilling both us and Burton's character. I understand that the Taylor part was written as a dying gay man and even Coward's part as a woman but it all works well like this and as I intimated earlier might well have been just too much for this tale of dying and the vanity of the living to be delivered undiluted.

Enough of this half-ass "I love Boom! but I know it's a guilty pleasure, because everyone says it's crap" nonsense.Boom! is a great movie. Period.There. Someone needed to say it.I first saw this film at a young age when it was first shown on TV, and found it fascinating and unforgettable. (Literally unforgettable, scene after scene and shot after shot; how often is that true?) Since then I've watched it a number of times, and never failed to be completely mesmerized by it on every level.My most recent viewing (on the DVD now available from the UK) comes after a sustained period of tracking down and watching all the available movies of director Joseph Losey. Boom! was the first Losey movie I ever saw, and for years after, any time I happened to see a Losey film, I found the experience fascinating but difficult to pin down. What was the Losey "thing"? Now, after seeing almost all of his work, I return to Boom! Is it as profound as Losey's best (King & Country, The Servant, Accident, Mr. Klein)? Absolutely.If anything, as I've drawn closer to death myself, the film's themes have grown more profound for me--the acceptance of inevitable death and the realization that all (not some of life, but ALL of life) is vanity. Tennessee Williams came to know a truth which cannot be expressed in literal terms, and so he wrote the original play, which is even more stylized and fabulous (literally: like a fable) than the movie. Joseph Losey was perhaps the only film director working at that moment with the artistic touch to transmute the story to film. The cast was perfectly suited to the larger-than-life (but not larger-than-death) theatricality of the film.Can the movie be enjoyed at the level of "camp"? Yes. Is it also a profound work of art? Yes.And there has never been another movie even remotely like it.

(There are Spoilers) Based on the 1963 Tennessee Williams play "The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore" the movie "Boom" is about a terminally ill rich high society widow who had outlived, not divorced, her six husbands and is now in the process of working on her autobiography before her final curtain call.A horror to work for Flora "Sissy" Golforth, Elizabeth Taylor, treats her servants that includes her ruthless and diminutive chief of security Rudi, Michael Dunn, and the on call doctor Dr. Evilo, Romolo Valli,worse then dirt. Consequently going into wild and uncountable fits as she pops pills and gets daily injections to keep the pain of the unknown and unnamed illness thats slowly killing her in check.Unexpectedly showing up at the island is poet Chris Flanders, Richard Burton, an odd sort of gentleman who hasn't really done anything worthwhile in the literary department in over ten years. Flanders is strangely attracted to the mad Mrs. Goforth who's looking to have one last fling before she goes out for good. The movie filmed off the island of Sardinia has Sissy living on this giant mansion atop a high cliff and just about driving everyone crazy to the point where they just, like her personal secretary Miss Black (Joanna Shimkus), can't wait to take the first boat out. Yet at the same time are stuck there knowing that it would be inhuman to leave the screaming but dying woman to face death all by herself.Besides the somewhat odd-ball Chris Flanders there's also the utterly weird and even more mystifying Noel Coward playing, in a part that was originally written by playwright Williams for a woman, someone called The Witch of Capri. Coward, or the Witch, had so many blood-transfusions over the years that he doesn't have a single drop of his own blood left in his entire body. The Witch is also very privy to who Flanders really is, the Angel of Death, and knows of a number of persons, now all dead, whom he had visited over the years.Flanders dressed, courtesy of the lady of the house Sissy, in a dark and ominous looking samurai outfit together with a razor sharp samurai sword is not at all fooled by Sissy's wild and crazy actions knowing that her time of earth is fast coming to an end. He also archives the odd and almost unenviable distinction of being the first and only man in the glamorous Sissy Goforth's life to refuses to jump into the sack with her after she invited him into her bedroom! A feat that must have taken almost Herculean will power on his part.We learn from both Flanders and the mysterious Witch of Capri, Noel Coward, that he was just an ordinary man trying to make a living, writing poetry, until some time back in California. Then Flanders helped a rich old miser from a local nursing home kill himself, by strolling into the Pacific Ocean, who like Sissy just couldn't take the pain anymore. Later coming under the influence or wing of an old Indian, or Native American, mystic Flanders then found his true reason and role in life and that was to be at the side of rich and dying men and women,like Flora "Sissy" Goforth. Flanders noble work is to ease them into the next realm of existence, death, with as little pain as possible.A bit hard to take at times with the then worlds most famous couple Dick & Liz having a ball interacting with each other on the screen to the point that you almost forgot that the very healthy and obviously well fed Sissy Goforth was actually on the brink of death. Richard Burton was a bit to old, at 42, to be playing the young and wondering poet of the Tennessee Williams play Chris Flanders and his wife Elizabeth Taylor was much too young, at 35, to be playing the much older Mrs. Goforth who had already been married six times. This took a lot out of the authenticity of the two parts that the leading two actors in the film played. The beautiful photography of the Mediterranen coast with the sea waves majestically crashing into the rocks did make the movie "Boom" more then watchable. There's also Miss. Taylor in an unforgettable scene dressed in a mind-blowing all-white Japanese Bobuki outfit, at a private dinner with The Witch of Capri, which was so eye popping that it would have turned heads and stopped traffic even at the very accident prone Indianapolis 500.

"Boom" is a BOMB, but it's a totally lovable bomb if you have even half a heart and a fully developed sense of the bizarre. John Waters (director of "Pink Flamingos") loves this movie, and so do I, probably for different reasons, but that's the beauty of wacky movies like "Boom." I love "Boom" because it's such a breathtakingly beautiful mess, just like Liz Taylor herself at the time she starred in it. Richard Burton is a lovely mess in this film as well; he's as hunky as ever, but his years of boozing are beginning to show. Thing is, if any two actors colliding with each other -- and with an outrageously choppy screenplay (written by the great Tennessee Williams himself; what was he THINKING?) -- can look absolutely divine while they're making the best of a bad situation, Liz and Richard can (and do) pull it off in "Boom." Frankly, I don't see how anybody could pass up a movie that features Michael Dunn (remember him from "Ship of Fools"?) playing a smirking, sadistic, jack-booted dwarf who thinks he's a generalissimo; the world famous playwright Noel Coward turning in a delightfully queeny version of himself at his prissiest; and the veteran Italian actor Romolo Valli ("The Garden of the Finzi-Continis," "1900") going all-out to make a fool of himself as a dope-pushing doc-for-hire ... for what more could you ask, except maybe Liz and Richard, and "Boom" has them all! That's not even the best part. The best part is the island of Sardinia, where the film was flawlessly photographed. If the dwarf and his vicious little doggies don't amuse you and Liz's goblet-smashing antics tend to annoy you, not to worry. "Boom" delivers such stunning photography of the wild beauty of Sardinia's unspoiled coastline that you won't run out of things to look at, not for an instant. "Boom" is total eye candy. As a Camp classic, it's tough to beat. If you adore Liz Taylor at her brattiest on the screen when she's insulting all the servants and chewing the scenery without even smudging her lipstick, this is the film for YOU!