He was, so the legend went (and still goes), a wild Celtic charmer who spoke with the tongue of angels but surrendered all too eagerly to the lure of liquor and financial plenty. I think Burton deserves a better biography than this and hope that one day he gets it, because this assuredly isn't it.Popular opinion about him tended to be negative and dismissive long before Richard Burton died of a stroke at 58. The end result is a muddled portrait of the artist who you feel has been sacrificed on the bonfire of Palmer's vanity. 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. 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. 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. 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. I'm an admirer of Burton but have to admit that this film wasn't really to my taste. Shame.Ī very individual and stylised screen biography of Richard Burton by long-time film-maker Tony Palmer. 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.

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. 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. 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. Celebrated and award winning though this may be, I found it lacking in direction and cohesion and a tendency towards haphazardness.

Melvyn bragg richard burton