Who's afraid of making a good movie?

Earlier this morning, against Stakeout, TCM ran Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. I had recorded it when it ran during 31 Days of Oscar, and watched it over the weekend not realizing it was on today. At any rate you can get it on DVD and Blu-ray, so you get a post on it anyway.

Richard Burton plays George, an assistant professor of history at one of those small New England colleges that dot the movie landscape. He's married to Martha (Elizabeth Burton), who happens to be the daughter of the college president, as we later learn. George hasn't advanced beyond assistant professor, and Martha doesn't let him forget that, or that he likely got the job because of her father.

Neither of them lets the other forget a lot of things, since they're constantly bickering. First on their way home from some university function, then in their kitchen, and even once some guests pop in.

Nick (George Segal) is a young biology professor at the school, married to Honey (Sandy Dennis), who is pregnant, a topic that winds up being a sore point between George and Martha. But then again, there are a lot of sore points between the two.

I said before that George and Martha keep up the bickering even when the guests show up, and boy do they do that. It gets worse and worse, to the point where if I had been in Nick's shoes, I would have gotten up and left. Not only do Nick and Honey not do that; they get in the car with George and Martha to go to a roadhouse for more drinks, and don't ask to be driven home after leaving the roadhouse.

Along the way, George goes on and on with Nick and Honey about his and Martha's son, whom we never see for reasons that will become clear by the end of the movie. In reality, George is doing all this talking because he wants to manipulate Nick and Honey to get back at Martha. Martha, for her part, is doing the same.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? goes on like this for an interminable 130 minutes. The movie received a plethora of Oscar nominations, and won for Taylor and Dennis; everybody says that the movie is a triumph of acting. Frankly, though, I hated all the characters, to the point that I really disliked the movie. George and Martha are nasty, volleying juvenile, masturbatory drivel back and forth and thinking they're oh-so-intelligent. Instead, the sound more like overgrown adolescents. If you remember the things you wrote as an adolescent and thought they were profound, only to go back and reread them and by embarrassed by what you wrote, well, that's what this movie is.

Now, I don't necessarily have a problem with movies that don't particularly go anywhere; I loved The Whales of August and really liked Larisa Shepitko's Wings. I can also appreciate movies with difficult people and topics, such as The Dresser. But Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is just obnoxious. I find it difficult to believe there are people who wouldn't want to shake some sense into these people like Bette Davis did to Miriam Hopkins at the end of Old Acquaintance.

So Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is definitely a movie you'll want to watch and judge for yourself.