At the height of her film career Elizabeth Taylor was one of the most famous women in the world, and even after she retired from acting she remained famous, largely because of her notoriously complex love-life. And yet there are a surprisingly large number of films on her CV which today are virtually forgotten and which even when first released probably did not arouse a great deal of interest. "Cynthia", dating from 1947 when Taylor was only fifteen, is a case in point.
Cynthia Bishop is a beautiful teenage high school girl from the small town of Napoleon, Illinois. Most of the plot revolves around the point that Cynthia is supposedly physically frail and suffers from health problems and is therefore not allowed to do many of the things that teenage girls normally do, such as attending the school prom. There is also a sub-plot dealing with the frustrated dreams of her parents Larry and Louise, both of whom once dreamed of going to Vienna, Larry to study medicine and Louise to study music. They never, however, realised these ambitions, and today Larry is a badly-paid assistant in a hardware store and Louise a housewife.
The film was based on a play called "The Rich, Full Life", and although I have never seen it- indeed, I had never previously heard of it or of its author, one Viña Delmar- that title seems to sum up the general theme. The idea is that one can still live a rich, full life even if one is an invalid or if one's youthful ambitions have been thwarted. The screenplay, however, does not fully realise the potential of either of the two plotlines, and too much is left unclear. We are never told exactly why Louise and Larry were unable to study in Vienna; the implication is that Louise accidentally became pregnant out of wedlock and that theirs was a shotgun marriage, but in the moral climate of the forties, with the Production Code still in full force, this could not be made explicit. (There is no acknowledgement of the fact that the Vienna of the 1930s, torn by political strife between Nazis, Communists, Socialists and Austro-fascists, might not have been the most congenial place in which to study, nor of the fact that there are perfectly good medical schools and colleges of music in America itself; the "Vienna" of this film is simply a romantic symbol of youthful illusions, not a real-life city).
Cynthia is the title character, and most of the action revolves around her, but the healthy-looking Taylor never makes a convincing invalid. It is never made clear exactly what illnesses Cynthia suffers from, beyond the fact that she tends to catch cold easily- Taylor spends a lot of the film sneezing- or whether her status as an invalid is genuine. It is strongly hinted that she may in fact be the victim of obsessive concern on the part of her over-protective parents, backed up by the local doctor (who also happens to be Cynthia's uncle)- what one might call hypochondria by proxy.
The film-makers never seem quite clear whether they are making a comedy or a serious family drama. The overall theme is a basically serious one, but in many parts, especially those scenes dealing with the rivalry between Cynthia and her insufferable cousin Fredonia, they are obviously aiming for laughs. (Whether they actually achieve them is another matter). Taylor displays both the beauty and the charisma which were later to make her a big adult star, but not unfortunately the talent, and there are no performances of any particular merit from anyone else in the cast. It is not difficult to understand why "Cynthia" is today one of the most obscure entries in Taylor's filmography. 4/10
