Cinema: Marital Armageddon

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? may well be rewarded at the box office primarily for not having the dirty words washed out of its mouth. With a reluctant blessing from censors, all the blunt four, five-and six-letter profanities that helped make Edward Albee's Broadway play a sizzling hit have been brought to the screen intact. But nasty language can be had for free on any street corner. A moviegoer who lays out his money to see Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in a blue comedy will get a shock of another color. Virginia Woolf at its best is a baleful, brutally funny explosion of black humor.

Albee, America's current master of theatrical invective, uses it here for potshots and heavy artillery in a marital Armageddon. His chief combatants are a pair of matched failures: George is an ineffectual, hagridden history professor; his wife Martha is the university president's daughter—a bitchy, aging man-eater with a father fixation and a casual lust for younger chaps. The entertainment takes shape very late one evening when a new young faculty couple stops by for a nightcap. "Give your coats and stuff to sourpuss," snarls Martha, and the foursome is off on an orgy of truth-and-consequences that lasts until dawn. They slosh down a superhuman amount of booze, blurt family secrets, swap partners, claw the flesh away from old, still-festering wounds.

As George, the caustic, cynical master of revels, Burton is superb, shrewdly measuring out his powerhouse talent in a part written for a far less heroic actor. A muffled drum sounded against the din of crashing china, he joylessly endures pain and joylessly inflicts it with the hollow stare of a man so sick of life that he cannot even relish his final vindictive triumph.

Broadway Director Mike Nichols, in his first movie job, can claim a sizable victory simply for the performance he has wrung from Elizabeth Taylor. Looking fat and fortyish under a smear of makeup, with her voice pitched well below the belt, Liz as Martha is loud, sexy, vulgar, pungent, and yet achieves moments of astonishing tenderness. Only during sustained eruptions does she lapse into monotony, or look like an actress play-acting animosity instead of feeling it. As the ambitious young prof whose blueprint for success includes "plowing a few pertinent wives," George Segal exudes callow opportunism assuredly. And Broadway's Sandy Dennis slyly interprets Segal's child bride as a sickly amoeba struggling to assert herself among dragons.

On screen or stage, Author Albee's catalogue of the games people play tends to become repetitive, larded with Freudian case history, and building to a fairly preposterous climax. When George and Martha agree to lay to rest the ghost of their nonexistent teen-age son, there is solemn talk about the sterility of illusions, but the real issue appears to be a playwright's need to make his verbal fireworks add up to something.