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.
Review of The V.I.P.s
