A very individual and stylised screen biography of Richard Burton by long-time film-maker Tony Palmer. I'm an admirer of Burton but have to admit that this film wasn't really to my taste.
While Palmer does tell Burton's story from birth to death in chronological order, it does so without any voiceover narration or sense of actual time and place of the events chosen to highlight the actor's life. The interviewees on camera are certainly varied, from many members of his family - he was one of originally thirteen children - through to his last wife and daughter, in between focusing on other formative influences from his school and college days, to a scant few of the actors and directors with whom he worked, like Robert Hardy, John Gielgud, Lauren Bacall and Mike Nichols.
Inserts from his films good and bad are dropped into the narrative but none are credited and they rarely tie in with the depicted chapter in his life and while Burton's undoubted personality as well as his obvious acting talent shines through, you struggle to see the wood for the trees, so hung up on technique is the director. Naturally Liz Taylor comes into the picture but we're not told much about their divorce and remarriage, far less how and why these things happened.
The end result is a muddled portrait of the artist who you feel has been sacrificed on the bonfire of Palmer's vanity.
I think Burton deserves a better biography than this and hope that one day he gets it, because this assuredly isn't it.
