A Night at the Airport

The V.I.P.s. The sufferings of the rich, as Hollywood well knows, are among the sweetest pleasures of the poor. This picture exploits the one to provide the other. In particular, it exploits the much-exploited sufferings of its principal players, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. In general, it exploits the predicament of four wealthy men and women whose flight is fogbound overnight in London Airport.

For most of them, delay invites disaster. Heroine Taylor is "eloping" to America with Louis Jourdan, and delay means that Hero Burton, the violently jealous millionaire the heroine is married to, will surely catch up with them. Orson Welles, a celebrated film director, has tax problems, and delay beyond midnight means that about -L-300,000 will be legally lifted out of his pocket. Rod Taylor, a tractor tycoon, needs a financial transfusion to save his corporate life, and delay means debacle.

Margaret Rutherford, a dotty old duchess, is off to become the assistant social director of a Miami Beach hotel, and delay means nothing to her. To the audience, however, it means a chance to see Her Grace, swaddled in a frock that may well be a 19th century golf bag and surmounted by a flat green hat that looks like a Sussex divot, fight free of a tenacious seat belt, roll down the ramp and stagger to the airport bar, where the headwaiter respectfully bellows: "A LARGE BRANDY FOR HER

GRACE!" Her Grace knocks back the brandy and then with a small mad leer of bliss sits marinating mindlessly. "Flying is a most peculiar experience," she muses. "First they tie you to your seat and say you are going to go. Then they untie you and say you are not going to go. Hah! You'd never catch the Queen Mary behaving like that!" After Rutherford, Burton and Taylor hardly seem worth watching. But Rod Taylor holds his own pretty well, and

Orson Welles does a magnificent takeoff on Orson Welles. In short, thanks partly to a couple of big fat camera hogs and partly to a tidy script by Terence (Separate Tables) Rattigan, The V.I.P.s is on the whole an entertaining film. The poor, that is to say, should find it entertaining; the rich may find it less than flattering. Director Anthony Asquith seems to agree with the fellow who remarked: "If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he has given it to."

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