User Reviews

This is a must for Richard Burton fans. It will knock you out. You see Rich quite drunk reciting the alphabet but what emerges is the heroic Welsh hero who "beat the world". It is tragic in that he died so young but his achievement speaks for itself. Melvyn Bragg adds successfully to the notion of a great artist, son of Wales, gone the way of dusty death in the Dylan Thomas mold. His daughter is very giving in her assessment of her father. I have been searching for the DVD since it came out. I copied off a PBS broadcast on "Great Performances". It is, quite simply, the best documentary of an actor I have ever seen. It is fair to Rich. The crowd that believes that he squandered his talent do not know the extent of his work. His likes will not be seen again...

Celebrated and award winning though this may be, I found it lacking in direction and cohesion and a tendency towards haphazardness. I cannot imagine why director, Tony Palmer would have been restricted in his choice of participants but the largely motley crew assembled here seem to create more problems than they solve. The erudite Melvyn Bragg, himself a biographer of Burton seems relegated to simply have pieces of his interview cut to repudiate the seeming ignorant nonsense spouted by Lauren Bacall, who sneers and snarls her way through an interview she seems to imagine should really have been about her. The film clips are okay, with Cleopatra looking particularly fine but the many other historical epic bits and pieces rather lost amid the wondrous experts from the likes of Look Back in Anger and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. There is early footage from Welsh days that is interesting and contributions from family members that is okay but for a two hour documentary with so much material to hand, this is a stage fixated luvvie affair that does the great man very little justice. Shame.

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.