Ok, I admit it. I have a guilty affection for this film. It's silly and shallow, but it's got a great performance by Richard Burton, and a pretty good one by Elizabeth Taylor. It's also gorgeously filmed in Big Sur country, and has an evocative soundtrack. "The Sandpiper" was filmed at the height of the Burton/Taylor mania. Richard plays a minister who runs an exclusive boys academy, and Liz plays the free-thinking artist mother who's son (Morgan Mason, James Mason's son) does some deer hunting out of season. The boy is sentenced to Burton's school to be saved from his mother's beatnik influence, and as the boy settles into life at the boarding school, Liz falls in love with the married minister Burton. They have a torrid affair, afternoons along the surf, etc., until a jealous colleague of Burton's blows the whistle on the pair. Corny, but I still love the movie.
Review of The Sandpiper
