Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday

“Ash Wednesday” is a melodrama of the sudsy variety that doesn’t work as a movie but may be of interest to certain audiences all the same. It’s about how a woman in her 50s (Elizabeth Taylor), whose marriage has been threatened by another woman, gets a facelift to try and keep her husband. She doesn’t, but she does get a good winter in a ski resort and an affair with Helmut Berger.

The film opens with almost clinical precision; a famous plastic surgeon explains his techniques to Miss Taylor while we watch him carry them out. He shows her what areas of skin he intends to remove, and at one point her face looks like one of those butcher’s, charts with all the cuts marked. Then he takes up scalpel and needle, and when he is done and she finally takes off the bandages voila! She looks as good as Elizabeth Taylor.

It is quite an improvement because when the movie opens she looks pretty bad. It must have taken some measure of courage for Taylor to allow herself to be made up and photographed so unattractively; maybe she got a double reverse kick, though, out of knowing that she’s so beautiful she has to be made up to look dowdy. And she is beautiful which is what the movie is about in its own way. There are lots of close-ups in which she is frankly vain as she examines her face with delight; that face by now is a national treasure, and we cannot help supporting any measures taken to preserve it.

Most of the action takes place at an expensive resort hotel where she goes to await the arrival of her husband (Henry Fonda). She hasn’t told him about the facelift: “At first,” she says, “I didn’t say anything because I was afraid it would seem like such a silly thing to have done.” A pause. “Now my only regret is that I didn’t do it years ago.”

Her husband is delayed in Washington on “business,” which is part business and partly an affair he’s having with a girl younger than their daughter. Taylor carries on a flirtation with Helmut Berger, mostly to test her new attractiveness, and eventually they make love. The fact that this affair takes about half an hour to develop and requires yards of schmaltzy Maurice Jarre music to consummate adds little to its interest.

In fact the whole movie feels longer than it is. It’s 15 minutes short of two hours, and still it takes forever to be over. The problem is that not enough happens; she waits at the hotel, she drinks, she eats, she meets her daughter for a tearful lunch, she talks with a friendly fashion photographer, she waits some more, sighs some more, telephones some more, looks at herself in mirrors and models the Edith Head wardrobe. It’s all so slight.

And despite what I said, the film may attract a particular group of people. When you’re as famous and in the public eye as Elizabeth Taylor, your external appearance takes on a certain significance for millions of people. Has she or hasn’t she had a face-lift? Does she need one? It’s that kind of off-screen gossip that gives “Ash Wednesday” its separate reality. The story isn’t very interesting but then we are not interested in it because it stars Miss Taylor.

She was not only weak but almost inevitable in this role. The unofficial title of world’s most beautiful woman changes hands rather often; one year it’s Ursula Andress, another Candice Bergen, still another Catherine Deneuve.

But Liz has won it so many times now that she ought to be allowed to keep it for good. She’s 40 or 41 years old and looks great, which is cheating. There is something compulsively sensuous about watching her look at herself in mirrors (which she does ad infinitum) if you’re Elizabeth Taylor, it isn’t vanity to appraise your beauty any more than it is paranoia if you’re really being followed.

Perhaps no man could leave Elizabeth Taylor; maybe that’s the ultimate difficulty with this movie. Fortunately (can you imagine the scene?), we never see Henry Fonda’s bimbo; unfortunately, we wouldn’t believe her if we did. This was also an insuperable problem with “Ryan’s Daughter”: What woman would leave Robert Mitchum for Christopher Jones? And the final confrontation between Miss Taylor and Mr. Fonda is awkward and unbelievable: The movie has been about the woman all along, not about the marriage, and he interacts with her less than he recites an announcement of termination at her.

It’’s just not convincing.

The title of the movie comes from Roman Catholic tradition wearing a smudge of ash on the forehead on Ash Wednesday as a token of man’s inescapable mortality and very well, too. For all she or anybody else knows, Elizabeth Taylor is immortal. Thank God for small favors.

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