HAMMERSMITH IS OUT (Peter Ustinov, 1972)

Peter Ustinov, directing from a spotty, foul-mouthed script by Stanford Whitmore, creates a Faustian fable that is sparked by two wonderful performances. Beau Bridges, performing harakiri on his clean-cut image, plays Billy Breedlove, a Texan redneck who, working as an attendant in a shady mental hospital run by Caligari’s descendant (Ustinov, as usual over-the-top), discovers his Mephistopheles in patient Hammersmith (Richard Burton, skillfully sounding his single deadpan note), who promises him wealth and power in exchange for effecting his (Hammersmith’s) freedom. Nose-picking Billy covets status. For a while, under a freed Hammersmith’s tutelage, Billy has his ride, rising in business and then politics, but all the while finding happiness elusive, even with the woman of his dreams, hash-house waitress Jimmie Jean Jackson, at his side.
     Bridges, then, gives one of the film’s two terrific performances; the other comes from luscious Elizabeth Taylor (best actress, Berlin) as Jimmie Jean Jackson, who is introduced to us in a blonde phase, and who eventually cheats on Billy with Hammersmith, giving birth to their daughter, by which time Billy has committed suicide and Hammersmith, straight-jacketed, is back in his old cell bargaining with a new attendant. Taylor is both very funny and sensitive/tender as Jimmie Jean—and possessed of a subtle dignity that clears the role of its stereotypical hurdles.
     A fine set-piece arrives late. Billy, paralyzed by a recreational accident that Hammersmith willed/engineered, is wheeled by Jimmie Jean into a spacious, empty room in their new villa. Billy is miserable; Jimmie Jean, aglow with the pregnancy about which Billy as yet knows nothing. The round room at once projects the expansion of Jimmie Jean’s hopefulness and the emptying of Billy’s hope—his entrapment in the solitudinous egotism into which his pursuit of the American Dream has crumbled.