Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?              A                    

USA  (131 )  1966 d:  Mike Nichols

A searing drama that strips away the surfaces and artificialities and leaves the cast of only four players totally wiped out and devastated afterwards, disgusted with themselves and one another, as this kind of abhorrent behavior is the stuff of live theater.  Edward Albee’s dialogue is stunningly rich and densely descriptive, but abusive and dehumanizing in every respect, as these characters learn to come after one another using words as claws, ripping into each other’s flesh until their souls bleed.  For some, it’s just a question of who bleeds more.  George and Martha are played by the real life married couple of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, both of whom blew enough smoke in each other’s lives to get divorced and married again, and then divorced a second time as well.  Their troubles likely revolved around excessive alcohol consumption, which is one of the main threads of this film, as the relationship turns into a boxing match where the players fight for a round, take a brief rest, then fight another round, etc.  Well the rules of the game are to keep playing until somebody gets knocked out.  In this case it’s pretty clear that there’s no one left standing.  George is an associate professor in the history department who married the daughter of the college president, but fell short of qualifications needed to head the department, even after being there for some twenty years, a weakness his wife uses for target practice.  They are joined for drinks one evening by a young newlywed couple, George Segal as Nick, a biology professor at the school with a driving ambition for more and his weak-stomached wife, Sandra Dennis as Honey.  

Shot in black and white by Haskell Wexler, the quiet opening could just as easily be the opening of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (1962), as it’s a peaceful pastoral setting overgrown by trees and plenty of closely cut grass.  The setting is night, as George and Martha return home after a dinner party, pour themselves a few more drinks, and the liquor continues to pour until dawn.  After a brief dust up, which plays out like foreplay, their anger with one another is sufficiently riled up until they continue on even after their guests arrive, who awkwardly see the incendiary fireworks flying fast and furious, as Martha can’t stop using her husband as a punching bag, insulting him, diminishing his stature and masculinity, and pretty much calling him a failure in every respect.  This is how the evening begins, as initially Nick and Honey politely stay out of it, but after a few rounds of drinks, they’re fair game as well, because who else can George retaliate against, since his wife has already shown herself to be a pretty tough customer.  Though only age 34 at the time the film was released, winning her 2nd Academy Award as Best Actress, Elizabeth Taylor as Martha is physically way over the top in this picture, drowning in alcohol, bellowing at the top of her lungs, hurling continual insults at the man she portrays as her mousy, good-for-nothing husband while curling up next to the “other” George, flirting openly with someone else’s husband whose wife is in the bathroom sick to her stomach from excessive alcohol consumption, perhaps the only sensible response all night.  But believe it or not, they’re only just getting warmed up.         

Somewhat reminiscent of Jean Eustache’s blisteringly honest The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain (1972), by the time the dust clears and people’s feelings and dignity have been obliterated, there are moments of quiet grace and poetry, especially in Martha, whose fragility and marital dysfunction draws a parallel to the delusional behavior in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Days Journey Into Night, especially the use of morphine in that play as a shield of illusion to hide behind, like alcoholism here, to avoid having to live with the real pain in their lives.  Language is the key component, used here as weapons, like heat-seeking missiles, that embellish the drop dead sensational acting performances, where characters can continually express that exact moment in time when their lives began to deteriorate and unravel, the incident that occurred when they began hating and despising one another, and that magic moment when it hit them that their lifelong dreams were a lost cause, including marital love and happiness.  Like Anthony Schaffer’s later play Sleuth, there’s a dynamic involved to disguise everything that’s real in games and parodies, in stories and making fun of others, but really what they’re covering up is their own broken hearts and dreams.  This is ultimately a sad, mistrustful affair, a series of hurt miscalculations cruelly undermining the worth of the human being, given a foreboding hint near the opening with a Betty Davis quote from a movie where she ultimately meets a tragic fate (BEYOND THE FOREST, 1949), described by critics as “the longest death scene ever seen on the screen,” which pretty much describes what happens from start to finish in this movie adaptation of one of the great American plays, one that spells out the end of hope, the end of love, and the end of illusion.   

BUtterfield 8

BUTTERFIELD 8                                C                                         

USA  (109 mi)  1960  ‘Scope  d:  Daniel Mann

Apparently Elizabeth Taylor initially rejected this screen role, but eventually changed her mind in order to fulfill the final movie of her MGM contract which Taylor claimed made her “MGM chattel” for 18 years, freeing her up afterwards to earn one million dollars in salary for CLEOPATRA (1963).  Despite winning the Academy Award for this performance, Taylor never warmed up to the material, allegedly throwing a drink in disgust the first time she watched it in a screening room.  There are also rumors that Taylor garnered the Academy sympathy vote, as she was extremely ill with pneumonia and nearly died, where many felt she might never work again.  It is true, Taylor had never lowered herself to this kind of trashy and tawdry material before, and despite providing an excellent performance, the film never rises to ever be about much of anything.  What’s kind of interesting is seeing how this role was preliminary material for hurling barbs and playful insults in the bawdy drinking games in her next Academy Award winning performance, WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? (1966).  In both films, she works with her real life husbands at the time, providing explosive fireworks with Richard Burton in the latter, while Eddie Fisher is simply her foil here.    

A note of interest, novelist John O’Hara’s name appears in the title credit, something rarely seen, adapted by John Michael Hayers, who wrote the screenplay for Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW (1954), and Charles Schnee, who wrote the screenplay for Howard Hawks’ RED RIVER (1948).  There are some clever exchanges between characters, verbal barbs that pass for veiled insults or sexual banter, but the film eventually deteriorates into near laughable material.  The opening ten minutes or so are wordless, with the camera following Taylor’s every move from the point she wakes up alone in bed, checking out the lay of the land, never uttering a word except a name and a phone number, until she leaves the luxurious New York apartment and hops in a cab.  This sequence features tense and over-anxious music that is completely out of synch with the otherwise quiet and calm demeanor of Ms. Taylor, who plays Gloria Wandrous, a sexually adventurous woman with a history of continually changing partners.  She is in her element getting picked up in bars where the clever one-liners are bitchy, sexually provocative, and highly aggressive, where it appears she can stand up to anyone and match them blow for blow, just verbal sparring where they usually end up in bed together.  The title is her answering service where she carefully screens and selects the men who interest her. 

Something changes, however, when she meets Weston Liggett (Laurence Harvey), a filthy rich playboy who keeps a wife and women on the side.  Despite his smug fratboy manner that suggests women are mere collections, something to be talked about in the executive boardrooms, when they meet in a bar they do produce verbal sparks, where she interestingly digs her spiked heel into the toe of his shoe when he grabs her arm, which is sexual stimulation for these two practitioners.  But all the promise in the world can’t hide where this film’s going, despite Gloria’s desperate attempts to gain respectability.  Noted for his role in THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962), where he plays a brainwashed victim subject to a hypnotic trigger code, Harvey always provides wooden performances, where his character barely registers a pulse.  Here he’s a bit more frenzied and on edge than usual, but simply no match for the emotional volatility from Taylor’s performance, always showing an appealing vulnerability, even playing this kind of trashy role which feels much like a lurid dimestore novel you can pick up at any airport book stall.  If there’s anything all of Ms. Taylor’s roles have in common in her 4 consecutive years of Academy Award Best Actress nominations, culminating with winning the award, it’s her ability to bring down the curtain with such distinguished high drama.  This film is no different, though it’s the least suspenseful, where the director actually adds a feeble addendum at the end that ridiculously shows how far this film has deteriorated, which without Taylor’s performance wouldn’t matter at all.