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Rating: - A competent rather than stimulating film...
The V.I.P. lounge of the London Airport is cunningly designed to exploit the real-life Burton--Taylor romance... In itself, the film is competent rather than stimulating...

Liz (very lovely to look at) once again is the neglected wife, comforting herself with a lover... When he's threatened by his wife's departure, the husband, who has given diamonds instead of affection, shows he cares... Liz is unyielding, however; she wants him to suffer... Only when Burton decides to kill himself and she finds out does she realize he needs her... The couple are reunited: despite their great wealth, despite his previous indifference, despite her temptations (Louis Jourdan is waiting in the wings), they are respectable, conventional people after all...

The inevitable reconciliation is reached by means of improbable coincidences... But the details hardly matter... The Burtons behave like stars, he shamelessly working his speeches as though they were Shakespearean arias, she being very dignified and remote, on her best lady-like behavior after "Cleopatra." At the end, she has a tearful scene that gives her the kind of torrential emoting she had practiced since "National Velvet" and "The Courage of Lassie;" for the rest, she's cool and serene, her face undisturbed by normal human expression... Playing an instigator of male insecurity, she's not, for a change, altogether sympathetic here...

The Burtons by no means dominate the movie, and again, as in "Cleopatra," the chemistry isn't quite there... He has that deep sonorous voice he's so immensely proud of; she's working with her high, little-girl breathiness... He's stage-trained, an emphatic classical actor... She's movie-trained, skillful at not giving the camera more than it can absorb... His bombastic language and her movie-fashioned subtlety do not mix; often they don't seem to be occupying the same movie space...

Burton was one of the finest classical actors of his generation, but as a movie actor in movie star material, he was no match for his wife... When they have good scripts, with equally weighted parts, as in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," and "The Taming of the Shrew," they are truly responsive to each other...

In "The V.I.P.s" Burton gives too much and Taylor just barely gives enough, but it doesn't matter... It's Old Hollywood pretentious and a big-cast movie like this is only as good as its supporting actors... Maggie Smith, as the unsophisticated secretary with a crush on her boss, and Margaret Rutherford, as the eccentric duchess, stole the show and won a Best Supporting Oscar...

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