The Sandpiper

Despite the behind-the-camera credits - not only Minnelli, but writers Dalton Trumbo and Michael Wilson - a truly dire romantic melodrama. Taylor is the free-lovin' atheist beatnik artist who lives in a Big Sur beach shack; Burton's the married Episcopal minister who falls in love after coming into conflict with her over her bastard son's lack of proper schooling. Meanwhile, a repressed and angst-ridden Eva Marie Saint hovers in the wings as his wife, and Bronson makes for an extremely unlikely sculptor. The film is quite simply so much soap: Burton's guilt is unreal, Taylor's redemptive boho is an embarrasingly clichéd travesty of '60s idealism, and the dialogue is both risible and turgid. Only the shots of the Californian coastline are at all classy, and they are totally superfluous to everything.