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Photos: Getty Images, Everett Collection ; Illustration: Dillen Phelps
Taylor Swift has just performed a major and somewhat unheralded pop star flex: Getting someone else to star in your music video for you. She’s done it before, casting Sadie Sink as her stand-in for the extended “All Too Well” video, but in her new video for “Elizabeth Taylor,” she turns to archive footage to do the job. The entire clip is made up of footage of the titular Hollywood star: Plenty of candid or news shots, including material from the 1968 documentary Around the World of Mike Todd, but many culled from her filmography, specifically from her peak stardom during the 1950s and ’60s. (Only one film, 1948’s somewhat less well-known Julia Misbehaves, comes from outside of that period.)
The eleven excerpted fiction films are all cited at the end of the video, but for any Swifties who know way more about one Taylor than the other, here’s a quick cheat sheet about where some of the key clips come from.
Let the Taylor/Taylor summit begin!
“Sometimes it doesn’t feel so glamorous to be me”
Early lines of the song are accompanied by images of Taylor in a nightgown from the 1954 film Elephant Walk – not necessarily one of her most famous films. It’s a drama where Taylor plays the new wife of a tea-farm owner, having trouble adjusting to life in Ceylon (not known as Sri Lanka) and frequently menaced by a herd of elephants. Even at the time of its release, it seems that it was considered pretty turgid stuff. While the optics of using a clip from a movie where a European woman feels alienated as the only white girl she knows in South Asia as the gateway for a melancholy consideration that fame and fortune isn’t as great as it looks, maybe we can give the younger Taylor some credit for winking at her privileged image. From there, the beginning of the video cycles through some better-known Taylor movies from the 1950s: a brief wedding-dress shot from the original 1950 Father of the Bride (the basis for the beloved Steve Martin movie), a pensive moment from A Place in the Sun (1951), and a few moments of private joy from Giant (1956).
“If your letters ever said goodbye, I’d cry my eyes violet / Elizabeth Taylor / Tell me for real / Do you think it’s forever?”
The montage speed accelerates as the song kicks into the chorus after the “cry my eyes violet” line. It seems like a quick ocular close-up here is from another Taylor (relative) obscurity, the 1968 cult movie Boom!, one of three Tennessee Williams adaptations Taylor starred in during her peak movie-star years. All three of these are represented in the video – a later instance of accelerated montage for the chorus also use footage from Suddenly, Last Summer – but Boom! is easily the least famous of the trio. It’s also used later in the video as footage for Swift’s line about “white diamonds” (also the perfume for which Taylor advertised later in life). In it, she plays a terminally ill woman grappling with how to let go of the material world.
The most noticeable Taylor glamor shot in this montage, however, the one the video actually uses over the line “Elizabeth Taylor,” is the actress winking in a scene from Cleopatra. Almost any shot of Taylor in an especially elaborate costume, headwear, or state of undress is from this 1963 boondoggle. The historical epic about the Egyptian queen was actually a major hit, the highest grossing of its year and one of the biggest movies of the 1960s. But it was also by most accounts the most expensive movie ever made at the time (and even adjusted for inflation, it would sit pretty high up there), and failed to recoup its production costs during its original release. Probably not a coincidence, then, that a shot from Cleopatra (featuring Taylor lying on her stomach, nude in profile and barely covered) accompanies the line “only hot as your last hit.” Cleopatra come back in the clip for another round of “be my NY when Hollywood hates me,” a good match for the film’s lavish notoriety as a troubled production.
“I can’t have fun if I can’t have… you”
The last line of the first chorus lingers, before the video makes a transition to more extensive behind-the-scenes footage of Taylor, lingers on a few shots from the 1954 film Rhapsody, featuring (in this excerpt) Taylor in a green patterned dress, taking a phonecall and dramatically touching her face in the aftermath. In the film, she plays a debutante in a love triangle with two different musicians. Like Boom! and Elephant Walk, it’s not a movie that looms large in the Taylor canon (or has been inducted into it at all). But you can see why a music-based melodrama from Taylor’s younger years might appeal to Swift.
“In the papers, on the screen, and in their minds”
Other movies that appear throughout the video include Love Is Better Than Ever (1952), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) (the second of her three Tennessee Williams movies), and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), one of her last major films. Two surprising omissions are Raintree Country and Butterfield 8, because they’re both movies where Taylor was nominated for an Oscar (though she received nominations for Roof, Suddenly, and Woolf as well). She even won the award for Butterfield 8, though she’d go on to win again for Woolf, and Taylor herself didn’t care for Butterfield 8, which was essentially forced to do under her MGM contract. Obviously Swift has some experience with those sorts of conflicts, and might prefer to avoid that one entirely. She hasn’t provided a full primer on the career of one of her favorite movie stars, but there’s more than enough in “Elizabeth Taylor” to get any newbies started.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Guardian, among others.
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