Richard Burton in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)
The on-screen relationship of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor that began on the 1963 Cleopatra finally ignited, unforgettably, in the film version of Edward Albee's stage play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Burton's performance as a stunted, cruelly sardonic academic overwhelmed with self-loathing was masterly in its own right. His impeccable timing, and ability to efface himself when necessary, sealed his wife's Oscar, allowing her full scope for her diatribes and spleen-venting - and she undoubtedly delivers a formidable performance.
It remains a mystery why Burton was not similarly rewarded. Indeed Burton was to be an unlikely bridesmaid throughout his career, with six Academy Award nominations, and a bare Oscar cupboard.
Burton has often been more than adept on screen in combative, needling performances and handling dialogue requiring him to make a withering riposte. (All Burton fans should try to catch that rarely seen, and hopelessly neglected, Nicholas Ray film Bitter Victory, with Burton and Kurt Jurgens at loggerheads.)
In Virginia Woolf the mutual vitriol of Martha, the college principal's daughter, and her husband, a lecturer who feels he's sold his soul for academic and marital comfort, is absorbing - and constantly discomforting.
We see the pair playing host to George Segal (as a slightly cocksure young academic recruit) and his mousy, simpering wife (Sandy Dennis) through one long, boozy evening as veneers are slowly stripped away. Martha is miffed by George's apparent bloody mindedness and inability to better himself. She takes refuge from disappointment by indulging a fantasy of wishful thinking that George tolerates for the most part.
Ernest Lehman's script and Mike Nichols' direction show fidelity to Albee's dialogue. The lines are vicious, the ugly mood - once created - is unrelenting but Burton, between bouts of volatility, at times retains an odd dignity and grace while the Segal character, patently brash and ambitious but largely unruffled early on, reveals a few despicable traits of his own.
Much nocturnal mutual soulbaring takes place in the garden but director Nichols, wisely, opens out the action only minimally, allowing close-ups to reveal the intensity of emotion and allowing us to absorb and savour to the full the work's meaning.
