Year of Release: 1966Country of Origin: USA
Director: Mike Nichols
Cast: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, George Segal, Sandy Dennis
Plot outline: A bitter aging couple reveal their deepest secret to a young couple during an all-night booze fest (IMDb).
Edward Albee's play of the same title has been brought to the screen without pussyfooting. Mike Nichols proved to be a brilliant director. Any transference of a good play to movie is a battle. The better the play, the harder it struggles against leaving its natural habitat, and Albee's extraordinary comedy-drama has put up a stiff fight. Nichols has gone to school to several movie masters in the skills of keeping the camera close, indecently prying; giving us a sense of his characters' very breath, bad breath, held breath; tracking a face - in the rhythm of the scene - as the actor moves, to take us to other faces; punctuating with sudden withdrawals to give us a brief, almost dispassionate respite; then plunging us in close again to one or two faces, for lots of pores and bile. Richard Burton was part of the star package with which this movie began, but - a big but - Burton is also an actor. He has become a kind of specialist in sensitive self-disgust, and he does it well. He is utterly convincing as a man with a great lake of nausea in him, on which he sails with regret and compulsive amusement. Elizabeth Taylor has shown previously, in some roles, that she could respond to the right director and could at least flagellate herself into an emotional state (as in Suddenly, Last Summer). Here, with a director who knows how to get an actor's confidence and knows what to do with it after he gets it, she does the best work of her career, sustained and urgent. Under Nichols' hand, she gets vocal variety, never relapses out of the role, and she charges it with the utmost of her powers - which is an achievement for any actress, great or little. As the younger man, George Segal gives his usual good terrier performance, lithe and snapping, with nice bafflement at the complexities of what he thought was simply a bad marriage. As his bland wife, Sandy Dennis is credibly bland. (NYT)
My judgement: ***1/2 out of 4 stars
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