MOVIE REVIEW
Who s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf (1966)
Screen: Funless Games at George and
Martha's:Albee's 'Virginia Woolf' Becomes a
Film
By STANLEY KAUFFMANN
Published: June 24, 1966
EDWARD ALBEE'S "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", the best
American play of the last decade and a violently candid one, has
been brought to the screen without pussyfooting. (It is now at the
Criterion and Loew's Tower East.) This in itself makes it a
notable event in our film history. About the film as such, there is
more to be said.
First things first. The most pressing question—since we already
know a great deal about the play and the two stars—is the
direction. Mike Nichols, after a brilliant and too-brief career as a
satirist, proved to be a brilliant theatrical director of comedy.
This is his debut as a film director, and it is a successful Houdini
feat.
Houdini, you remember, was the magician who was chained
hand and foot, bound in a sack, dumped in a river, and then
appeared some minutes later on the surface. You do not expect
Olympic swimming form in a Houdini; the triumph is just to
come out alive.
Which Mr. Nichols has done. He was given two world-shaking
stars, the play of the decade and the auspices of a large looming
studio. What more inhibiting conditions could be imagined for a
first film, if the director is a man of talent? But Mr. Nichols has at
least survived. The form is not Olympic, but he lives.
Any transference of a good play to film is a battle. (Which is why
the best film directors rarely deal with good plays.) The better
the play, the harder it struggles against leaving its natural
habitat, and Mr. Albee's extraordinary comedy-drama has put up
a stiff fight.
Ernest Lehman, the screen adapter, has broken the play out of its
one living-room setting into various rooms in the house and onto
the lawn, which the play accepts well enough. He has also placed
one scene in a roadhouse, which is a patently forced move for
visual variety. These changes and some minor cuts, including a
little inconsequential blue-penciling, are about the sum of his
efforts. The real job of "filmizing" was left to the director.
With no possible chance to cut loose cinematically (as, for
example, Richard Lester did in his film of the stage comedy "The
Knack"), Mr. Nichols has made the most of two elements that
were left to him—intimacy and acting.
He has gone to school to several film masters (Kurosawa among
them, I would guess) in the skills of keeping the camera close,
indecently prying; giving us a sense of his characters' very
breath, bad 'breath, held breath; tracking a face—in the rhythm
of the scene—as the actor moves, to take us to other faces;
punctuating with sudden withdrawals to give us a brief, almost
dispassionate respite; then plunging us in close again to one or
two faces, for lots of pores and bile.
There is not much that is original in Mr. Nichols's camerawork,
no sense of the personality that we got in his stage direction. In
fact, the direction is weakest when he gets a bit arty: electric
signs flashing behind heads or tilted shots from below to show
passion and abandon (both of them hallmarks of the college
cinema virtuoso). But he has minimized the "stage" feeling, and
he has given the film an insistent presence, good phrasing and a
nervous drive. It sags toward the end, but this is because the
third act of the play sags.
As for the acting, Mr. Nichols had Richard Burton as George. (To
refresh us all, George is a fortyish history professor, married to
Martha, the daughter of the president of a New England college.
They return home from a party at 1:30 A.M., slightly sozzled,
drenched in their 20-year-old marital love-hate ambivalence. A
young faculty couple come over for drinks, and the party winds
viciously on until dawn. In the course of it, Martha sleeps with
the young man as an act of vengeance on George. The play ends
with George's retribution—the destruction of their myth about a
son they never had.
Mr. Burton was part of the star package with which this film
began, but—a big but—Mr. Burton is also an actor. He has
become a kind of specialist in sensitive self-disgust, as witness
the latter scenes of "Cleopatra" and all of "The Spy Who Came In
from the Cold," and he does it well. He is not in his person the
George we might imagine, but he is utterly convincing as a man
with a great lake of nausea in him, on which he sails with regret
and compulsive amusement.
On past evidence, Mr. Nichols had relatively little work to do
with Mr. Burton. On past evidence, he had a good deal to do with
Elizabeth Taylor, playing Martha. She has shown previously, in
some roles, that she could respond to the right director and could
at least flagellate herself into an emotional state (as in "Suddenly,
Last Summer"). Here, with a director who knows how to get an
actor's confidence and knows what to do with it after he gets it,
she does the best work of her career, sustained and urgent.
Of course, she has an initial advantage. Her acceptance of gray
hair and her use of profanity make her seem to be acting even
(figuratively) before she begins. ("Gee, she let them show her
looking old! Wow, she just said 'Son of a bitch'! A star!") It is not
the first time an American star has gotten mileage out of that sort
of daring. Miss Taylor does not have qualities that, for instance,
Uta Hagen had in the Broadway version, no suggestion of
endlessly coiled involutions. Her venom is nearer the surface.
But, under Mr. Nichols's hand, she gets vocal variety, never
relapses out of the role, and she charges it with the utmost of her
powers—which is an achievement for any actress, great or little.
As the younger man, George Segal gives his usual good terrier
performance, lithe and snapping, with nice bafflement at the
complexities of what he thought was simply a bad marriage. As
his bland wife, Sandy Dennis is credibly bland.
Mr. Albee's play looks both better and a little worse under the
camera's magnification. A chief virtue for me is that it is not an
onion-skin play—it does not merely strip off layers, beginning at
the surface with trifles and digging deeper as it proceeds. Of
course, we learn more about the characters as we go, and almost
all of it is fascinating; but, like its giant forebear, Strindberg's
"Dance of Death," the play begins in in hell, and all the
revelations and reactions take place within that landscape.
What does not wear well in the generally superb dialogue is the
heavy lacing of vaudeville cross-talk, particularly facile non
sequiturs. (Also, in Mr. Lehman's version, so much shouting and
slamming takes place on the front lawn at four in the morning
that we keep wondering why a neighbor doesn't wake up and
complain.)
More serious is the heightened impression that the myth of the
son is irrelevant to the play. It seems a device that the author
tacked on to conclude matters as the slash and counterslash grew
tired; a device that he then went back and planted earlier. Else
why would Martha have told the other woman the secret of the
son so glibly—not when she was angry or drunk—if she knew she
was breaching an old and sacred compact with her husband? It
obtrudes as an arbitrary action to justify the ending.
The really relevant unseen character is not the son; it is Martha's
father, the president of the college. It is he whom she idolizes and
measures her husband against, it is his presence George has to
contend with in and out of bed. It is Daddy's power, symbolic in
Martha, that keeps the visiting couple from leaving, despite
circumstances that would soon have driven them out of any other
house.
Awareness—of this truth about Daddy, of multiple other truths
about themselves and their world—is the theme of this play: not
the necessity of narcotic illusion about the son, but naked, peeled
awareness. Under the vituperation and violence, under Martha's
aggressive and self-punishing infidelties, this is the drama of a
marriage flooded with more consciousness than the human
psyche is at present able to bear.
Their world is too much with them, their selves are much too
clear. It is the price to be paid for living in a cosmos of increasing
clarity—which includes a clearer view of inevitable futilities. And,
fundamentally, it is this desperation—articulated in childless,
broken-hearted, demonically loving marriage—that Mr. Albee
has crystallized in his flawed but fine play.
And in its forthright dealing with the play, this becomes one of
the most scathingly honest American films ever made. Its
advertisements say, "No one under 18 will be admitted unless
accompanied by his parent." This may safeguard the children;
the parents must take their chances.
The Cast WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?—
Screenplay by Ernest Lehman, based on the play by Edward
Albee; directed by Mike Nichols; produced by Mr. Lehman,
presented by Warner Brothers. At the Criterion Theater,
Broadway and 45th Street and the Tower East Theater, Third
Avenue and 72d Street. Running time: 130 minutes. Martha . .
. . . Elizabeth Taylor George . . . . . Richard Burton Nick . . . . .
George Segal Honey . . . . . Sandy Dennis