# Directors: Mike Nichols
# Rating: NOT RATED
# Studio: Warner Home Video
# DVD Release Date: December 5, 2006
# Run Time: 131 minutes

# Actors: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, George Segal, Sandy Dennis, Frank Flanagan

Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (USA) (complete title)

You are cordially invited to George and Martha’s for an evening of fun and games.
Mike Nichols’ first directorial effort represents a milestone in psychological realism and “foul” language in American cinema. George and Martha as played superbly and without vanity by Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton are as far from the bourgeois 1950s perfect married couple as you can get alternatively badgering berating abusing and loving each other both alone and accompanied by the naive young married couple that have come over for a nightcap (portrayed brilliantly by George Segal and Sandy Dennis). The fun and games in which George and Martha involve Nick and Honey are a lacerating look at the older couple’s existence where the emotional brutalizing fill an unspeakable void at their center and a troubling preview of what the younger couple’s life could become. Edward Albee’s dramatic vision combines the banal the vulgar and the poetic and Ernest Lehman’s adapted screenplay is amazingly faithful to the structure of Albee’s play. The acting is uniformly excellent and Taylor and Burton were never better together. A harrowing movie experience but very worthwhile and finally unforgettable.

DVD Cover: