92. Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? (1966)

Stars:  Elizabeth Taylor (Martha), Richard Burton (George), George Segal (Nick), Sandy Dennis (Honey)

Director: Mike Nichols

Awards / Honors

• 5 Oscar Wins – Best Actress (Elizabeth Taylor), Best Supporting Actress (Sandy Dennis), Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design

• 7 Additional Oscar Nominations - Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Richard Burton), Best Supporting Actor (George Segal), Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay), Best Film Editing, Best Music (Original Score), Best Sound

• #67 on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies list (2007)

Genre:  Drama

Running Time:  2 Hours, 11 Minutes

Format:  DVD (not yet available on Blu-ray)

Odyssey Rating:  3 ½ Stars (John - 4 Stars, Beth - 3 Stars)

John's Take

Three things.

First, after watching this movie I have decided that at some point I have to see the movie “A Man for All Seasons”, and “The Fortune Cookie”.  This is because Paul Scofield, who beat out Richard Burton for Best Actor and Walter Matthau who beat out George Segal for Best Supporting Actor must have had unbelievable performances in those movies.  However, unless I am just blown away by those two performances, I am just going to have to assume that the “fix” was in that year.  It has been a long time since I have been as impressed with the performance of an entire cast as I was with the cast of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  Granted, there are only four people in the movie (five if you want to count the bartender that has a single line), but still…  If you want to see an example of why Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton are “Screen Legends”, then you don’t need to look any farther than this movie.

Second, if you want to understand how symbolism can be used effectively in a story, this is a good movie to study.  Virtually everything in this film has some sort of symbolic importance – even the title of the movie.  For those of you are not familiar with Virginia Woolf, she was an early 20th Century English author who is best know for stream-of-consciousness writing that frequently touched the effects of war and other forms trauma on individuals.  Her worked also tended to touch on the idea of living life with no life with no illusions.  Early on in the movie, Elizabeth Taylor’s character sings “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” as a parody of the Disney song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf” from “The Three Little Pigs”.  However, as the movie goes on, it becomes clear that this movie is going to delve quite deeply into the real meaning(s) of that question – Who’s Afraid of Living Life without Illusions?  Who’s Afraid of Looking at the Damage We Do to Those We Profess to Love?  As we watch George and Martha’s little after-hours party, the symbolism continues flow into the dialogue at gradually quickening pace, until the dialog stops being simply symbolic and transforms into a type of foreshadowing. George and Martha are always one step ahead of their guests (and us the audience) – the true meaning of their banter and arguing only becomes clear later as we learn more about them.  However, just as we have figured out what their earlier statements really meant, they are off busy talking and arguing about something else. 

Third, this film is probably one of the exhausting movies I have ever seen.  I have been in 2 hour-long arguments / fights with family members that were less exhausting than watching this movie.  Watching four people tear into each other for two hours can take a lot of out you.

After the film was over Beth and discussed if this was the most tragic / depressing of the movies on are list that we had watched so far?  Initially, we both felt it was clearly the most depressing, but as we discussed it, it became a little less clear cut.  For example, Sophie’s Choice – the story a Holocaust survivor – is hardly a feel-good romp.  Then you have movies like The Last Picture Show and Do the Right Thing, not to mention pure melodramas like A Place in the Sun and Wuthering Heights.  Declaring a film “most-depressing-so-far” wasn’t quite so clear cut.

Ultimately, however, Beth and I returned to this movie as “the-most-depressing-so-far”.  It won out for two reasons.  The first reason was the forementioned exhaustion we felt after watching it.  Watching Sophie having to choose between her son and her daughter was horrifically sad.  Watching Sonny come to realize that he would never escape that small town was depressing.  Radio Raheem being murdered by the police was tragic.  However, none of those things left us feeling like we had just run three miles.  The second reason is that the other movies all leave the viewer some sort glimpse of hope – Mookie and Sal come to an understanding; Singo goes on with his life; Ruth Popper is there for Sonny; the spirits of Heathcliff and Catherine walk off together; even George manages to come to terms with his fate at the end of A Place in the Sun.  In Who’s Afraid, however, no one escapes unscathed. There is no glimpse of hope – all four of them are trapped, and they don’t even have their lies to hide behind anymore.

I truly believe that this film truly deserves to be referred to as a “classic”.  Despite that this movie is artistically and technically brilliant I can’t give it a perfect ranking of 5 Stars.  As I mentioned back in the All the President’s Men post, for me to consider a movie truly great and get a 5 Star rating from me, I need to find it highly re-watchable.  It has to be able to make me stop and watch it if I happen to stumble across it while channel surfing.  I can say with all honesty that the odds of me watching this movie again casually are pretty low.  It is just too emotionally brutal.  Thus, it is just going to have to make due with a ranking of 4 Stars.

John

93. The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

Stars:  Frank Sinatra (Maj. Bennett Marco), Laurence Harvey (Raymond Shaw), Angela Lansbury (Mrs. Iselin), James Gregory (Sen. John Yerkes Iselin), Janet Leigh (Eugenie Rose Chaney), Leslie Parrish (Jocelyn Jordan) 

Director:  John Frankenheimer

 

Awards / Honors

• 2 Oscar nominations - Best Supporting Actress (Angela Lansbury), Best Film Editing
• #67 on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies list (1998)
• #17 on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Thrills (2001)
• #21 on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains – Mrs. Iselin, Villain (2003)

Genre:  Drama (Political Thriller)

Running Time:  2 Hours, 6 Minutes

Format:  DVD (not yet available on Blu-ray)

Odyssey Rating:  3 Stars (John - 3 Stars, Beth - 3 Stars)

 

John's Take

While watching this movie, Beth and I started discussing the apparent lack of purpose that Janet Leigh’s character, Eugenie, has in this movie.  During that brief discussion, Beth made a comment something along the lines of “Why does Janet Leigh always play these weird roles? Like how she gets wacked right near the beginning of Psycho…”  Her comment struck me for two reasons.  First, I was pleasantly surprised that Beth even knew that Janet Leigh was in Psycho.  Truth be told, despite me being a larger “classic film” buff than Beth, if you wait six months and ask me, “What is the name of the actress that killed at the beginning of Psycho?”, I would probably choke and not remember.  I am terrible at names and I pretty much rely on Beth to keep me up to date on “entertainment news”.  If I want to know which star is getting married / getting a divorce, she is the person I turn to.  However, Psycho was bit before her (and TMZ’s) time, so I was pleasantly surprised.  Kudos to Beth.  The second reason her comment struck me as profound, was the fact that it was probably more truthful than she realized.  Not to disparage the career of Janet Leigh, but one has to admit that her most well-known roles all have sort of odd twist / idiosyncrasy that contribute as much to their notoriety as does her performance.

 

For example, there is the previously mentioned Psycho (film #16 on our list, by the way) in which her character is killed in the first third of the movie despite being the “star” of the film.  In the film Safari, her character decides it is good idea to tour a crocodile-infested river in a rubber raft.  In Touch of Evil…  OK, the fact that Charlton Heston is trying very hard and failing equally as hard to play a Mexican character – yet it still kind of works because, well, he is Charlton Heston – is more quirky than anything Janet does in the film.  That being said, does anybody believe for a second that Janet Leigh is physically capable of strangling anyone?  No, I didn’t think so.  So, why do any of the characters in the film believe she could?

 

That brings us back to her role in this film.  While watching the film I just assumed that she was tossed in because some Hollywood exec decided that Frank Sinatra needed a love interest and hat film needed more “star power”.  However, I wanted to make sure it wasn’t a case of me just missing some subtle element in the script or her performance that explains why the heck she is even on screen.  Thus, I decided to do a quick internet search before I wrote this post – no harm in double checking.  Guess what I found!  In the Frequently Asked Questions section of the IMDb entry for The Manchurian Candidate was the question, “What’s Up with Janet Leigh’s Character?” Ah-ha!!  Beth and I were not ones who noticed that her character was pointless and much of her dialog didn’t really make sense.  So, what was the answer to the question you ask?

Rosie's inexplicable dialogue in the train scene was taken, according to the director's commentary, from the novel.  Its meaning is a manner of debate among fans and is up to interpretation.  It's possible she was simply saying strange things to catch his attention. Another theory is that she was Marco's [Frank Sinatra’s] "American operator," working with the conspiracy and trying to control Marco.  Another theory, which the 2004 remake endorses, is that she was working with the federal government. 

In other words, nobody really knows.  How terribly unsatisfying.

 

I guess I could go read the novel, but since I really have no desire to do that, I decided to do the next best thing – look up the novel in Wikipedia and see if I could find an answer there.  Unfortunately, I really only managed to learn that this film is considered by some to be a fairly accurate portrayal of the book (which implies that the Eugenie character is just as ubiquitous in the book as in the film), and that the author, Richard Condon, died roughly 15 years ago which means asking him directly is not really an option at this point. Again, terribly unsatisfying. 

 

This unresolved question then brought to mind yet another question.  In an industry know for “adapting” source material in anyway they happen to see fit, how does a successful director like John Frankenheimer not take a look at the script and say, “Hey, this character makes no sense. Maybe we could just cut her right out and have Janet play Leslie Parrish’s part…”?  Having Janet play Leslie’s part seems like a reasonable solution to me. J anet would have ended up with more or less the same amount of screen time and the film would still have had “big name” actress.  At least Leslie’s character had a point to it.  Not only does a surprising amount Janet Leigh’s dialog make no sense, her character really doesn’t do anything to move the plot along.  You could literally cut out all of her scenes from the finished work and it would have absolutely no affect on the plot whatsoever.  No one would even miss her. 

 

However, that isn’t what happened and we are stuck with this slightly annoying ambiguity.  It appears that the question of “What’s Up with Janet Leigh’s Character?” is simply one of those mysteries that will never truly be solved.  More’s the pity.

 

I give The Manchurian Candidate a rating of 3 Stars.  Overall, it is a good movie and I would certainly watch it again, but there are certainly better movies on this list.

 

John