Keith - I’m glad you enjoyed it. It was a rushed write-up and I had mixed feeling about sharing it. Hope you get eth opportunity to see it in the future!

I loath the types of films and characters the movie is depicting so the subtle irony of the thing, if it exists, just didn’t work for me. If the film managed to shock and awe the audience it intended to, I applaud it. But the pedestrian nature of the thing just failed for me on a lot of levels.

I prefer my critiques of the bourgeoisie dished up by directors like Luis Buñuel, Godard and Joseph Losey. It’s just plain hard to not view Ash Wednesday as dated when you compare it to something like Losey’s incredible Boom released years earlier. Audiences may have walked out on Boom and I’m sure many of the film’s themes went right over their heads, but Ash Wednesday could easily be viewed as “Boom light” made digestible for the masses and I prefer the original. Doing a scene by scene comparison of the two films and exploring the way they handle similar themes would be an interesting endeavor.

Maybe if a giant Yeti monster had showed up in Ash Wednesday to terrorize the wealthy bored guests at the secluded ski resort, I wouldn’t have found the movie so damn dull?

I’ve got nothing personal against Larry Peerce or his movies, even though I’ve only seen a couple of his films and TV productions, but this thing was just plain tedious after the opening sequence. I’m not sure why you feel the need to defend the director over this one failure and why you didn’t notice the positive things I did say about the movie, Howard?

On the other hand, I think I made it pretty darn clear why I disliked Ash Wednesday as well, but if you need me to give you a rundown of the film’s problems again I’ll point them out. It absolutely wasted Helmut Berger and gave him nothing to do except gaze at Taylor, which is a cinema crime of the highest order in my book. It was also shot like a TV movie of the week with very little style and there was much too much vaseline used on the camera lens. As much as I appreciated Taylor’s low key performance here, I much prefer Taylor when she’s chewing up the scenery and Henry Fonda seemed utterly lost in his role. I forgot to mention how awful the soundtrack was, but there you go.

The film’s themes just didn’t resonate with me at all. As a woman, I found Taylor’s character too confused, frail and unbelievable here. The idea that she would have plastic surgery just to keep an unfaithful husband left me utterly cold and seemed lifetimes away from the proud women Taylor usually plays. I’ll take the Taylor who doesn’t role over for any man - much less have PLASTIC SURGERY for him! - in movies like Boom, Identikit, Night Watch and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, thank you very much.

Now please make the case for Ash Wednesday. I’d love to read your defense of the film.

Circle of Two qualifies as both, a bad May-December movie. I still watched it though. It was on cable all the time in the early eighties.

Well he certainly had his share of those too, didn’t he? In fact, Circle of Two

Indeed I can! I wonder why he was so morally offended by the film? He was a master of May-December romances, but Burton was probably old fashioned enough to find the idea of an older woman and younger man unacceptable. Then again, maybe he was just morally opposed to bad movies?

As a horror film it could have been MUCH better. Maybe if the film borrowed its plot points from Dorian Gray instead of a Lifetime Movie of the Week, it would have worked? Taylor would have made a perfect female version of Gray and it would have been fun to see Berger play one of her love interests. Berger’s long been one of my favorite actors, but he’s wasted in this film. I suspect that he spent most of his time trying to avoid being verbally or physically attacked by Burton.