I’ve tried to watch The Only Game in Town (’70) a couple of times, but I can’t get through it.
Directed by George Stevens and written by Frank Gilroy (the playright dad of Tony and Dan), it’s a limp and artificial two-hander, and claustrophobic in more ways than you can shake a stick at. There’s no believing Elizabeth Taylor and Warren Beatty as a prospective couple (she’s an aging chorus girl, he’s a piano-playing gambler). You just want to say “thanks, guys, nice chatting” and bid a fast farewell. Which, as noted, is what I’ve done twice.
Plus Taylor is about five years older than Beatty, and in your 30s you notice this stuff. His hound-dogging exploits were legendary at the time, and you can’t quite figure why Beatty of all people would want to get involved with a violet-eyed woman who’s pushing 40 and is almost certainly on her way down.
It was largely shot in Paris on a sound stage; location footage in Nevada was lensed some time after.
The Oniy Game in Town was such a commercial and critical flop that it ended Stevens’ career. The poor guy was only 66 when it bombed. In a fair and just world he could’ve theoretically continued to direct for at least another decade or so. The film is such a stain on Stevens’ rep that his son, George Stevens, Jr., didn’t even mention it George Stevens: A Filmmaker’s Journey (’85), a well-regarded doc about his esteemed father’s career.
Here’s the screwball thing: Beatty’s gambler character is named Joe Grady. Four or five years later he played a journalist in The Parallax View under director Alan Pakula, and that character was named Joe Frady. If only the up-and-coming Beatty had, 15 years earlier, landed a bit part in Stanley Kramer‘s Inherit the Wind (’60) as Matthew Harrison Brady’s (i.e., Fredric March‘s) son, Joe.
Posted in comment thread on 1.17.24:
George Stevens on Mia Farrow from an interview in 1975 by Patrick McGilligan and Joseph McBride:
Q : How did THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN come together? Casting Elizabeth Taylor with Warren Beatty was rather odd.
A : My wife and I wanted to go to Paris. And Liz Taylor is a buddy of mine. And Warren Beatty is a real buddy. So I read the script [by Frank Gilroy, based on his play]; it’s a very nice little script, but it’s none of my work. I wasn’t going to take that script apart and give it more size and space, but I liked it. And I said I’d do it. Frank Sinatra and Taylor were part of the deal. That script? I don’t see how they made the deal. Now with Liz and Frank Sinatra, it’s all going to be considerably unreal. But if you can make it pretty real, it’s going to be rather interesting. Frank Sinatra fell out of it, and I called up Warren. He said, ‘Count me in.’ Now I’ve got a problem. It won’t work. Liz won’t work with Warren. And so we’ve got to use this other girl, what’s-his-name’s daughter, the Irish director’s daughter…
Q : Mia Farrow [daughter of the late John Farrow]?
A : Mia, yeah. She’s fragile. She’s sensitive. She can stumble around and be a little problem. But with Warren Beatty in this fragile little piece, it could have been real. Warren is very human and bucolic in a young domestic situation. I said, ‘Okay, we can still do it.’ Dick Zanuck, who was running Fox, flew over to Paris, and I said, ‘We can’t do it with Liz Taylor, now that we’ve got Beatty. The frank thing to do is just to tell Liz that it will not be good for her and put Mia Farrow in the picture.” Dick is all for it. Well, somebody told Liz. Jesus, 1:55 a.m. and somebody’s banging on my door at the Georges V. In comes Liz. She says, ‘Well, I’ve had a new experience in my life, thanks to you. I’ve been fired from a picture.’ I said, ‘What do you mean, fired? You don’t want me in this picture. I want you in the picture, ut the way this is working out, you don’t want to be in this picture. It’s not right. Taylor and Sinatra fine — Taylor and Beatty no good. Drop Beatty, get someone that goes with Taylor. But the two are not going to make the story believable.’ Well, anyway, by that time Zanuck has come. And she gives him hell and all of that, and then [Richard] Burton arrives. They all arrive in my room. I said, ‘What the hell. Let’s go ahead and do it. See what happens.'”
In his March 5, 1970, review in The New York Times, Vincent Canby stated, “Assigning [Stevens, Beatty, and Taylor] to the film version of Frank D. Gilroy’s small, sentimental Broadway flop is rather like trying to outfit a leaky Central Park rowboat for a celebrity cruise through the Greek islands. The result is a phenomenological disaster Nothing in The Only Game in Town seems quite on the up and up. Everything, including both the humor and the pathos, is bogus.”