WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? (68)

Directed by: Mike Nichols (1966)

Starring: Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, George Segal, Sandy Dennis

The Pitch: A middle-aged professor and his blowsy wife invite a younger couple to one of their vicious all-night bickering sessions.

Theo Sez: A bad idea, in many ways - an unfilmable play that should've stayed on the stage ; though, incredibly, they almost manage to pull it off. The problem isn't the talkiness per se - the cast have a powerhouse way both with the stream of acidic one-liners ("If you existed, I'd divorce you!") and with the big speeches, and besides it's interesting to trace the line from these characters talking about Bette Davis to Barry Levinson's Tin Men talking about BONANZA, or Tarantino's hoods talking about Big Macs (would he have been writing for Broadway instead of Hollywood, 30 years ago?). The point is rather that the whole idea of games-playing, which underlies the drama, is a theatrical conceit that doesn't translate well to film - probably because the theatre, requiring more of a suspension of disbelief in the first place, makes dissimulation seem more natural : in films, with their air of stark reality, we're more impatient with characters who live in their own world, unless we can sense the real world about to intrude (as it does for Blanche DuBois or Willy Loman). The solution is to overwhelm the screen with theatricality, to make the characters' world of games overtly unreal (as, e.g. Mankiewicz does in SLEUTH) ; instead this does the opposite, aiming - through Haskell Wexler's grainy images - for a brutal kind of hyper-naturalism which must have looked stunning enough in 1966 to disguise its blatant unsuitability to the material. Fortunately it still looks pretty stunning, which, with its no-holds-barred performances and brilliantly incongruous guitar score, makes the film a still-potent (if dated) experience. You keep getting caught up in the mad roil of florid speeches and over-the-top dialogue, then keep having to remind yourself how artificial it all is.