You are cordially invited to George and Martha's for an evening of fun and games*
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
Directed by Mike Nichols
Adapted by Ernest Lehman from the play by Edward Albee
Released by Warner Bros on June 22nd, 1966
Nominated for 13 Oscars, winning 5.
To celebrate the anniversary of this stone cold classic from 1966, Team Experience is revisiting the picture, tag team relay style, all week long as we did with Rebecca, Silence of the Lambs, and Thelma & Louise.
Pt 1 by Nathaniel R
50th Anniversary Four Part Mini Series
When I was a young teenager, a multiplex opened about a half hour from my house that, like every multiplex, showed whatever movies were in wide release. But here was something novel and unfortunately not copied by every multiplex in the land thereafter: they devoted one of their screens exclusively to charity -- the charity of young cinephilia that is. One of the screens, every showing of the day, only ran an older classic as if it were a new release. For an entire week! Then they'd switch movies. I've never again seen a multiplex do that and if it had been closer to home I would have been the most devoted patron. It was there that I first saw Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I thought it was an outstanding elegaic drama and though I freely admit I was too young to grasp its very adult comic brilliance, I'd rarely seen acting that electrifying. In 1966 when it first arrived the posters said "no one under 18 will be admitted unless accompanied by his parent " Perhaps that was wise as it's wholly meant for adults.
00:01. It's fitting that our first shot is of the moon in the dead of night. George and Martha are not werewolves but beware all who enter George & Martha's lair; this is definitely a horror movie...
Before the score kicks in and the camera descends in longshot to look at a university house, which spills George (Oscar nominated Richard Burton) & Martha (Oscar winning Elizabeth Taylor) from its door and onto the campus sidewalk to stumble home, the orchestra sounds like its warming up. It's a perfect sonic nod to the property's live theater origins. A demented harpist is doing runs before Alex North's Oscar nominated score settles into something gently sorrowful.
01:45 Already a favorite moment and the movie hasn't truly begin. As soon as the title card appears Elizabeth Taylor starts just cackling as Martha walks across the Virginia to the Woolf. George tells her to shut up because it's 2 AM.
02:16 How lonely but not alone that shot is! How many times have George and Martha made this exact walk at night from that exact building and how many other couples have they tortured entertained in their home after just such a faculty party. I didn't think about these things the first time I saw it but now they're unavoidable mental associations.
Every time I've seen the movie since that first time, it's been just as electric only now the charge is coming from all corners of cast and crew (how about Haskell Wexler's Oscar winning cinematography!?) and not just the Movie Star Couple at the center. In fact, I felt nearly as aroused as George & Martha whenever they realize they've twisted the knife just right in the other's belly, when I queued up the movie again for this particular revisit. Since Liz begins the movie quoting Bette Davis, we'll do it, too, albeit from a different movie entirely.
Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night.
04:00 Surely one of the great introductory shots in all of cinema, Martha flips on the light. We get our first good look at the central couple, blinking and boozed-up. They've seen better days. Martha takes a look around and starts doing Bette Davis gestural circles with her hand...
'What. a. dump.'
Hey, what's that from? 'What a dump.' What's it from ferchrissakes? 'What a dump.' What's that from? Some damn Bette Davis picture. Some goddamn Warner brothers epic.
04:55 A movie star quoting an older movie star and pissing on the studio behind the classic movie which also happens to be the studio behind the new classic we're watching while complaining about the "fright wig" the other actress wears while wearing one herself ?!? This is our kind of movie.
Elizabeth Taylor tears into this Martha role from the very first scene and never lets go. It's her own shot at a Bette Davis gorgon role and she doesn't waste a frame. When people talk about actors going big they often say "chewing the scenery" but in honor of Liz we should probably change it to "gnawing the chicken wing." That poor dead bird. Honestly "de-glam" would have never gotten such a bad name if all of the performances in that wheelhouse were as brilliant as Liz's vanity free battle axe but none of them are.
This scene goes on and on but Liz/Martha just won't let Bette or her familiar hand gestures go. Bless.
06:00 The more you know about movies, the funnier this sequence is. Because Martha keeps berating George for not knowing what he's talking about -- he suggests she's thinking about a movie called Chicago, but she's a 'dumb bell' herself, to use her own pejorative.
'Chicago' was a 30s musical starring little miss Alice Faye. Don't you know anything?"
Actually, Martha, the Alice Faye movie you're thinking of is In Old Chicago and it's not really a musical (though Faye sings) nor is it her picture, Tyrone Power being the lead in a story about an Irish family. But anyway. The couple keeps arguing and Liz keeps "doing" Bette with such verve she could be a drag queen. They eventually let Bette go and argue about other things. The subject is incidental and rarely the actual subject of these arguments. They argue for argument's sake and Edward Albee's genius play and Ernest Lehmann's smart adaptation help us to understand this from the first lines.
Liz is SO funny when she brays "I don't bray!" with her back to the camera.
-Fix me a drink.
-Haven't you had enough?
-I said fix me a drink."
07:46 Oh, George. The last thing you say to an alcoholic is "Haven't you had enough?" They've never had enough. That's the whole point.
07:58 A brief glimpse of set decoration perfection: Literally the only thing in George & Martha's freezer is a bag of ice. Ha! They're not into solids. Except Martha's chicken wings.
08:29 As they ascend the stairs to their bedroom, Martha drops the bomb that they have guests coming over. Her father, Dean of the University, asked her to befriend them. She can't even do this without making it into a war with George by spitting out the words and refusing to answer his question about who these guests are -- they're from 'the math department' -- just that Daddy said to be nice to them is all.
Daddy said!
09:20 God bless the longshot which is so underemployed in movies now. Elizabeth Taylor's performance (easily one of the best in the history of Oscar Everything) isn't half as shaken and stirring if you can't see all the work she's doing with her body. It's not just those grotesque facial expressions or that needling broken-record voice. This little movement she does when she taunts George by talking about daddy is deliciously funny, specific and mean. It falls somewhere between a little girl curtsy, a gleeful hop, a time travelling toddler's 'look at me' precociousness, and an adult mocking just that sort of child. Only Martha doesn't really hit any of these physical targets because she's drunk and her free floating hostility slurs her aim.
09:57 Their bedroom has fun details. A nightgown hangs from the dresser drawer rather than folded inside it, various bottles and discarded glasses (with alcohol still in them), are casually dispersed throughout. The books are heavy academic reads. Martha starts straightening up but can't commit, shoving a crumb-covered plate into a dresser drawer. She then shoves various items with nowhere else to be under the bedspread, burying the clutter. This is my kind of cleaning woman.
11:15 George wants to sleep but Martha won't let him. My best friend audibly groans in movies when we get a character delivering the title in dialogue form. He always finds it stitled and coarse. For me I love it and reach for the proverbial popcorn every time whether it's stilted, coarse, clever, rote, or wholly perfect as in this case. The brilliance of Martha's sing-song nursery rhyme movie title is that it's a reference to an inside joke that we'll always be outside of. You had to be there; you weren't.
Hell, George was there, and he still doesn't think it's funny. This device is sheer Brechtian perfection.
You laughed your goddamn head off when you heard it at the party!
12:18 Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? would still be a fun watch if the performances were only half as good but Liz & Dick's chemistry -- the fact that they can break into smiles and laugh in the middle of a fight -- because they'ved helped each other be particularly mean -- is so genuine and idiosyncratic. Their rapport grants the characters and the drama and comedy so many extra sparks. But this weird cuddle-break curdles into hateful sparring just as soon as its started when Martha requests a "sloppy kiss" and George refuses. They return to the living room to prepare for the guests.
14:41 The fluidity of these fights is really something. Individual lines will read as wholly guileless conversation only to be replaced in the very next beat with play-acting affectation... as if neither of them can ever decide which part of their toxic marriage is real and which is performed for their collective amusement or from their discontent.
I swear if you existed, I'd divorce you.
14:51 The confidence to swallow lines as famous as that one with a big gulp of bourbon!
15:25 The doorbell incessantly rings. Time for the next "movement" in this bitter symphony. But just before they open the door George references "the bit" "THE BIT?!?" "the bit about the kid" to Martha's surprise. She isn't to mention him! Even before we understand what they're talking about this is the start of the movie's ticking time bomb, its lit fuse if you will.
16:00 Enter Nick (Oscar-nominated George Segal) and Honey (Oscar-winning Sandy Dennis). Director Mike Nichols (in his film debut) brilliantly frames it exactly like the first clear shot of George and Martha. The light is too bright and it's a rude awakening for both the audience and the couple. The door opens on the sounds of George and Martha's vicious barb-trading "subhuman monster"/"goddamn you!" over the faces of these nervous guests.
Hiiiii there. Just ignore old sourpuss here."
Martha's over compensation is wonderfully underlined by Taylor. It's (almost) the only time Martha will try to be human and welcoming but she's terribly unconvincing at it.
I said come on in, now come in.
16:34. She gives up immediately, returning to drunk belligerence. This four-shot is staged in such a way that in a normal movie the couple entering, so large in the frame, would be the imposing figures but here it's the littler inebriated old-marrieds that inspire the cold sweats.
18:00 But the young couple sits down and tries to be cordial, Honey continually trying to keep it light and social, Nick barely disguising his fear of / attraction to Martha, George purposefully taunting Nick with intellectual superiority, and Martha swinging madly between playing hostess, needling George, flirting with Nick, and feigning interest in Honey's mousy chatter. There is SO MUCH GOING ON and Nichols always keeps more than one actor in frame (usually three or four) so you can enjoy every performance and chart all the simmering relationships that will soon come to a boil.
20:01 As a reminder that this is still the private war zone of George & Martha the younger couple is soon playing audience to the ageless war between them when the subject of Daddy running the university where George has made his unimpressive career rises again.
-Some men would give their right arm for the chance.
-Yes, Martha, but in reality it works out that the sacrifice is of a somewhat more private portion of the anatomy.
20:57 One of the few one-shots in thisscene but it's perfection: Nick tries not to watch the George & Martha Show but no issue of Paris Review will prove distracting enough. When Martha and Honey vanish to go to "the euphemism", George and Nick are left alone for George the cat to play with Nick's uncomfortable mouse. They stand by a map of "Martha's Vineyard" (haha - these set decorators were having fun) as they discuss their teaching and George continually bats at polite Nick's attempts to wiggle free.
George continually gets Nick's profession, age, and status in his department wrong -- purposefully on all counts one supposes. He then goes on a long venomous ramble about Martha's 200 year old father. I'll leave it to my team members to say more about the movie's toxic masculinity and daddy issues because there is one other thing I simply must discuss in part one.
28:07 ...the editing.
The claustrophic one night drama is exquisitely cut by Oscar nominated Sam Steen (he lost the Oscar to a spectacle car race movie, Grand Prix) who is continually juggling our perspectives of the room, capturing moodily lit and framed shots from Wexler, spontaneous performance beats, and in this particular sequence abruptly abandoning the movie's preference for three and four shots.
Steen counter-intuitively and brilliantly disorients the audience with several quick cuts to the listener rather than the speaker, wherein the dialogue (shouted or softly spoken), startles the listener whether or not the speaker means for it to rattle, and whether or not the dialogue is even for their ears. It's unnerving, exciting, and the movie's pulse goes suddenly racing after all the bickering foreplay. Remember that bomb counter from earlier?
George to Martha (screaming): MARTHA!!!
George to Nick (as Honey reemerges unseen rom her house tour with Martha): How many kids are you going to have?
Honey to George: I didn't know that you had a son!
TICK. TICK. BOOM.
He warned her not to bring up 'the bit'. Nick and Honey try to leave but it's obviously too late for true escape.
30:31 This night of marital terror has only just begun. As if on cue, Martha (who is not about to miss out on any high drama) reemerges, newly changed into something more comfortable (i.e. tighter, hornier, younger) and ready to light her cigarette off the fires that are already burning.
Why Martha, your Sunday chapel dress.
(Heh. Richard Burton is so rich and funny and hauntingly self-and-Martha deprecating in this role.)
You can deglam the actress but you can't demythologize the diva. Liz gets her movie star reintroduction half an hour into the movie, blowing smoke in the air and looking well worn but fabulous yet.
Looking back on it now, Liz's crass braying but still flammably seductive Martha shouldn't have been such a revelation to me as a teenager. She was, in my youth, already a much older basically retired actress, not a "sacred cow" as celebrities go but a very famous old public figure who hawked White Diamonds perfume, occassionally showed up on TV, and who Joan Rivers liked to make fun of. But even once you've seen the full scope of Liz's career, from horse-loving ingenue to swoonworthy young beauty to aging activist to old mouthy storied celebrity, Martha remains a towering and still bracing triumph. Imagine what a shock to the system it must have been in 1966!
31:48 Martha asks for another drink (haven't you had enou-- oh, right. Never mind) and begins phase two of the evening: seduce and destroy, in no particular order but preferrably simultaneously, as she flirts wildly with Nick while belitting George as an old "bog" in the history department.
Hey Swampyyyyyyyy!
Martha is a vicious one. It's not just chicken wings she'll clamp her jaws around and refuse to let go. When is George going to break? Will Nick and Honey ever escape this apartment or is this actually hell a la Jean-Paul Sartre's "No Exit"? Find out in Part 2 as Daniel Crooke continues our look back...