stage/screen

Money Led Burton, Harrison to 'The Staircase'

By PETER BELLAMY

›*PARIS — Although Richard Burton and Rex Harrisön make loud noises about their artistic reasons for playing homsexuals in the forthcoming film, "The Stairease," there is another and overwhelmingly

reason. ;

practical

Burton is being paid $1 million to do it and Harrison will receive $750,000. And off screen Harrison can keep right on being Sexy Rexy and Burton a masculine sex symbol and the husband of Elizabeth Taylor:

The two discussed their role as a couple of pathetic fagon a Paris movie set sonthentically English it bear special mention.

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IT. IS THE creation of France's talented set decorafor, Willy Holt, who was born in California, but has spent all but two of his 47 years in Paris.

To construct this bit of London's gloomy inner city in the shadow of the Eiffel

"

Rex Harrison

Tower, Holt had to provide 5,000 items indigenous to London..

funeral

He furthermore had to build London streets complete with typical shops turf accountants, parlor, grocer, dairy and a post office. The shops are filled with British products ranging from Players cigar-

ettes to Lyons tea.

In addition, the produc-

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ers imported a red London double decker bus, a milk van, a score of wheelbarrows and dozens of English cars of varying models and age.

AT THE END of one of the streets, Holt erected a typical London church with

a towering steeple. Below it is a churchyard as British as one finds in Brixton, London, the film's locale.

The film is being made in Paris primarily to save Burton tax money.

While being interviewed by some 40 American journalists, Burton and Harrison stood in front of the downat-the-heel barbership which they operate in the film.

Harrison said that in "The Staircase" it was essential the actors concerned be heterosexual, since were they real homesexuals "it would be a pantomime.'

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"This story is really about loneliness and human

Richard Burton

failure," the actor said. "It's a brilliant commen tary on our times.'

BURTON

REMARKED gleefully: "Rex plays a real ́ old mum in this one. He's absolutely adorable, but

he's not the old Rex Harrison we knew and loved. He shrugs his way into a

chair, walks with little short steps-it's a sort of posting."

Harrison resumed: "We

joke constantly on the set, but it's actually frightening how much we're enjoying the whole thing. I hadn't seen the stage play when producer Stanley Donen approached me about doing the picture.

"He already had Burton in mind and the whole thing boiled down to an 'I'll do it, if you will' sort of thing. My next picture will be The Right Honorable Gentleman' in which I play a notorious woman lover.

BURTON RECALLED he wanted to appear in the play on stage with Sir Lawrence Olivier, but the British National Theater turned the project down...

"In "The Staircase' Harry is a failure, a lonely man poor and a homosexual, Burton said. "I suppose I'm not a failure. I am rich. I am not lonely and I love women.

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Asked how he could reenact so accurately the gestures of a homosexual and perform such acts as ironing, shopping, washing, which he never does in real life, Burton replied:

"IN MY profession I have come across quite a few

Harrys and although I have not copied one particular one particular one, they they have all helped me to strike the right figure."

Harrison's final word on "The Staircase" is: "I think I'm a nice girl and I

think Richard is a nice girl, too."