Crew
Director – Peter Ustinov, Screenplay – Stanford Whitmore, Producer – Alex Lucas, Photography – Richard H. Kline, Music – Dominic Frontiere. Production Company – J. Cornelius Crean Films, Inc..
Cast
Richard Burton (Hammersmith), Beau Bridges (Billy Breedlove), Elizabeth Taylor (Jimmie-Jean Jackson), Peter Ustinov (Doctor), John Schuck (Henry Joe), Anthony Holland (Oldham), Leon Ames (General Sam Pembroke), George Raft (Guido Scartucci), Leon Askin (Dr Krodt)
Plot
Billy Breedlove is a new orderly at the asylum and wants to run away with the local waitress Jimmie-Jean Jackson. Hammersmith, one of the inmates, promises Billy that if he leaves the door of his cell open then he will provide money beyond his wildest dreams. Billy does so and Hammersmith escapes. Hammersmith takes Billy and Jimmie-Jean with him on a journey across country in a stolen car where Hammersmith simply kills anyone in the way and takes what he wants. By such means, Hammersmith proceeds to take over a strip club and then a pharmaceutical company, all the way up to having Billy made the Vice President of the United States.
Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were the It Couple of the 1960s. They two met when they were cast together as Anthony and Cleopatra in the massively expensive production of Cleopatra (1963), where they began an affair despite both of them being married to others. They married the following year, which lasted through until 1976, including a divorce in 1974 and remarriage in 1975. During this time, they appeared together on screen in a number of films that included The V.I.P.s (1963), The Sandpiper (1965), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), The Taming of the Shrew (1967), Doctor Faustus (1967), The Comedians (1967), Boom! (1968) and Under Milk Wood (1972). Hammersmith is Out was the last of their theatrical collaborations and would be followed by one other with the tv movie Divorce His – Divorce Hers (1973).
Hammersmith is Out was directed by actor Peter Ustinov who had gained a reputation since the 1940s, being nominated for Academy Awards for roles in Quo Vadis (1951) and winning Best Supporting Actor for both Spartacus (1960) and Topkapi (1964). Ustinov also directed and usually wrote several films including School for Secrets (1946), the bodyswap film Vice Versa (1948), Romanoff and Juliet (1961) and Billy Budd (1962), his most acclaimed film. Hammersmith is Out was not a box-office success and to date has not been released outside of a 1980s video release.
I am not surprised Hammersmith is Out was a box-office flop. I think a large part of it is that audiences didn’t know what the heck to make out of it beyond the pairing of its name stars. Ustinov’s direction is broadly comedic, often entering into the farcical. Once it gets out of the asylum, the film progresses through a series of situations where Beau Bridges is a hayseed idiot who (with Richard Burton as puppetmaster) is propelled through taking over a strip club, a pharmaceutical manufacturer and then to become the Vice President of the USA. A generous comparison might be to the progression made by Peter Sellers’ blankly innocent gardener in Being There (1979). The less positive comparison and more likely place that the film strikes is around the level of the flop of Candy (1968), which also featured an appearance from Richard Burton.
Elizabeth Taylor gives one of her worst performances. She seems completely out of her range, not to mention batting way below her capabilities, trying to play a ditzy blonde airhead. On the other side of the coin, Richard Burton has great gravitas and presence, even if you feel that the film never makes enough out of such presence. Beau Bridges plays a hillbilly-accented idiot – Robert Redford was apparently considered for the part and it is mind-boggling thinking of him in the role of such a dimwit who seems to have only a single brain cell. You don’t expect that Hammersmith is Out would have done much for either actor’s career prospects.
Ustinov’s set-ups progress through various of these scenes, which are played broadly and with an occasionally mordant sense of humour – Mafioso ending up dropped from a hotel window into the backseat of their waiting vehicle, a group of businessman all ‘accidentally’ drowned in a swimming pool. But there is no real cleverness or sophistication to any of this. There is not much to it as a plot beyond the picaresque progression of scenes.
Hammersmith is Out is said to be an adaptation/modernisation of the Faust story where a man conducts a deal to sell his soul to a Devil figure in order to get the woman of his dreams. There is not too much of that here – so much as it is a story about a clueless idiot who is taken under the wing of a machiavellian figure. Whether Hammersmith is The Devil is an issue that could be up for debate. He seems to have a methodology where he simply goes and takes what he wants, killing anyone in the way. There is no directly supernatural process to any of this, although he does seem to have a great deal of luck avoiding authorities and appears to have the ability to snap his restraints at one point. The most direct scene is one at the bar where he makes an allusion to having been at the Garden of Eden.
Full film available here