There is no reason to fear Virginia Woolf! She died a long time ago, and even when she was alive she wasn’t very feisty. So why have we been asking ourselves the musical question Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for nearly five decades? How is this Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton yell-fest relevant now? Let’s set the table for our son and investigate.

The Praise

This film holds the distinction of being the only one in Oscar history to be nominated in every category for which it was eligible: best picture, director, actor, actress, supporting actor, supporting actress, adapted screenplay, editing, sound, musical score, black-and-white art direction, b&w cinematography, and b&w costume design. (This was the last year of separate categories for black-and-white and color, by the way.) It won five of its 13 potential Oscars, including actress and supporting actress, and also took the BAFTA award for best film. The American Film Institute’s 1998 list of the 100 greatest American movies ever made omitted Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but it appeared at No. 67 on the 2007 revised list.

The Context

When Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? premiered, in October 1962, a couple things happened. First, it was the toast of Broadway, winning five Tony Awards and running for more than a year and a half. People called it the best American play of the decade. It was chosen to receive the Pulitzer Prize for drama.

And second, everyone figured there was no way it could ever be made into a movie.

The reason — and this is hard to fathom in 2011 — is that the play had a lot of swearing in it. Seriously. That’s it. Well, it had some sexual references in it, too, but the cussin’ was everybody’s big hang-up. (That Pulitzer Prize it should have gotten was canceled after the advisory committee declared the play too vulgar.) We’re talking about “son of a b****” and various Lord’s-name-in-vain imprecations, by the way — no F-bombs. In other words, it’s language that would get by easily with a PG-13 rating today.

At the time, however, it was controversial. Even theater audiences were not accustomed to hearing that sort of talk on Broadway (not inside the theaters, anyway; out on the street, sure). But it was a serious play, and a seriously good one, and serious theatergoers overcame whatever objections they had to its coarse language. What’s fascinating is that despite this, conventional wisdom held that it couldn’t be a movie unless the dialogue was cleaned up. Why would it be OK for a stage play to use words that a movie can’t?

The answer, of course, is that stage plays didn’t have an organization looming over them, bent on ensuring they conformed to a broad set of standards. Hollywood did have such a body: the Motion Picture Association of America and its notorious Production Code. If you didn’t adhere to the code, the MPAA wouldn’t “approve” your film, and some theaters wouldn’t show films that didn’t have the MPAA seal. But the code, in place since the early 1930s, had begun to relax slightly in recent years, and films like The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) and Some Like It Hot (1959) — both released without the MPAA’s approval — proved that a movie could be financially successful anyway. Meanwhile, a new interest in European films, some of which pushed against Hollywood’s boundaries, was also helping to loosen things up.

It was in this climate that writer/producer Ernest Lehman convinced Warner Bros. to let him make a movie version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? without changing Albee’s dialogue. Lehman was a proven success, having written the adaptations of The King and I, West Side Story, and The Sound of Music, as well as Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, but his luck with this sort of thing — really, anyone’s luck with this sort of thing — was untested. Warner executives gave him the green light and waited nervously to see what would happen.

I can’t imagine the Warners were encouraged by Lehman’s choice of directors. Mike Nichols had never made a film before, and while he was highly praised for work as a director of stage plays, almost all of his experience was with Neil Simon and Neil Simon-esque comedies. Albee’s play, though sometimes scathingly funny, was an entirely different beast. And did I mention it was Nichols’ first film?

Knowing the project needed all the help it could get, Lehman and Nichols filled the lead roles with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, who, in addition to being two of the biggest stars in the world at that time, were also married in real life. They’d met while making Cleopatra (1963), when they were both married to other people, and their affair, divorces, and subsequent marriage made them fixtures on the gossip pages.

But they were serious actors, too, not just celebrities. Taylor had been nominated for four Oscars, winning one of them (for 1960′s BUtterfield 8); Burton had four nominations of his own under his belt. Taylor gained 30 pounds in order to look older and dowdier. She and Burton would later say that the energy required to play this spiteful, disastrous married couple had an adverse effect on their own marriage.

The Movie

Late one night after a faculty party at an unnamed New England university, George (Richard Burton), a history professor, and his wife, Martha (Elizabeth Taylor), invite a younger couple (George Segal and Sandy Dennis) back to their house for a nightcap. This other couple discovers that George and Martha’s marriage is caustic and crazy.

What It Influenced

But hey — what ever happened with the film and the MPAA? The group’s new president, Jack Valenti, had been on the job only a few weeks when he was faced with this particular problem. By his own account, he and the MPAA’s lawyer met with Jack Warner and his aide, negotiated for three hours, and eventually resolved that the film would get the MPAA’s seal of approval if the verb “screw” was removed, and if Warner would stipulate to all the film’s advertising including a notice that “no one under 18 will be admitted unless accompanied by his parent.” Warner said OK.

So after all that worrying, the movie not only got made but got released with MPAA approval. This was a victory, as well a death knell for the MPAA’s way of doing things. A few months later, Blow-up raised some of the same issues, and Valenti realized that the whole system needed to be thrown out. In 1968, the MPAA unveiled the rating system that continues (with some alterations) to this day. It would no longer be necessary for a movie to be suitable for either ALL audiences or NO audiences. There could finally be some common-sense degrees of difference. Of course, the rating system is now corrupt and useless and arbitrarily applied, but it was a good idea when it started.

The film was also a box-office hit, the third highest-grossing movie of 1966. Mike Nichols suddenly became hot; his next film, The Graduate, made him even hotter. Sandy Dennis, an acclaimed theater actress just getting started in movies (WAOVW was only her second), followed up her Oscar-winning performance here with respectable work in Up the Down Staircase (1967), Sweet November (1968), and The Out of Towners (1970) before returning to the stage. Taylor and Burton, who’d already appeared together in Cleopatra (1963), The V.I.P.s (1963), and The Sandpiper (1965), followed Virginia Woolf with four collaborations in the space of 18 months: The Taming of the Shrew (1967), Doctor Faustus (1967), The Comedians (1967), and Boom! (1968).

What to Look For

The title comes from a joke that Martha made earlier in the evening, which she keeps bringing up because it apparently got a good laugh (and because it annoys her husband). We never learn the exact context of the joke, but it’s a play on “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?,” the song from Disney’s “Three Little Pigs” cartoon. You’ll notice, however, that when she sings it, she has the tune wrong. That’s because the licensing rights for “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” were prohibitively expensive (you gotta pay royalties if you use somebody else’s melody), so the movie has her use the tune from the nursery rhyme “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush” instead.

When George shows up with a bouquet of flowers and says, “Flores para los muertos,” he’s referencing A Streetcar Named Desire — another acclaimed play-turned-movie about a woman losing her youth, her beauty, and her marbles.

The stage version of Virginia Woolf runs about two hours and 40 minutes (not counting intermissions), and the film is about a half-hour shorter. Most of the trims are minor — overall, the movie is extremely faithful to Albee, who approved of the film after some initial skepticism about the casting. Note that the first 66 minutes of the movie occur in real time, allowing us to spend more than an hour of uninterrupted mayhem with these people.

What’s the Big Deal?

As one of the final, crucial nails in the coffin of the old MPAA system, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? holds a special place in movie history. It also represents the pinnacle of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton’s success as an on-screen pair of actors, and it launched the movie career of director Mike Nichols. Drunk harridans and their emasculated husbands have never been the same.

Further reading: Believe it or not, this very non-plot-heavy film actually has a couple of surprises. The contemporary reviews assumed everyone had seen the play, though, so nobody was worried about spoiling anything, and most commentaries written more recently assume everyone has seen the movie and are likewise unconcerned. So if you don’t already know all the details, you MUST watch the movie before reading any of these!

Here’s Stanley Kauffmann’s review in the New York Times; the unsigned review from Time magazine; and Tim Dirks’ “Greatest Films” scene-by-scene analysis. Finally, Dan Callahan’s essay provides interesting background on the play and Albee.

Related columns: What’s the Big Deal?: The Graduate (1967).

What’s the Big Deal?: Blowup (1966).

What’s the Big Deal?: A Streetcar Named Desire (1951).

Tags: edward albee, elizabeth taylor, george segal, mike nichols, mpaa, richard burton, sandy dennis, who's afraid of virginia woolf