Woolf Dog

...But in the play, at least, the jokes functioned so as to make the living-room in which the three long acts of nastiness pile up a more and more unlivable-in place, filled with the smoke of human bitterness and the stench of thwarted lives...

...Dana Smutna, the girl, has a face in which lyrical and tragic poetry are equally at home, and Ivan Mistrak, the boy, has the disarming spontaneity of genuine, youthful talent...

...ON SCREEN By John Simon Woolf Dog According to an announcement from Warner Brothers, their forthcoming thriller, Chamber of Horrors, will feature "two important motion-picture health-safety devices -the Fear Flasher and the Horror Horn...

...it is surely a dramatic blunder...

...I particularly enjoyed the visual pun of a map of Martha's Vineyard on the wall...

...If Sweet Light in a Dark Room, a Czech film made six years ago, had been released here before The Shop on Main Street, it would have garnered the plaudits Shop received instead of getting clobbered with invidious comparisons...

...One need not go so far as Friedrich Dürrenmatt, who contends that a close-up is in itself an indecency, to feel that a piece of foolishness uttered in a close-up comes out more foolish than the same line spoken on a stage where it is absorbed to some extent by the plurality of available sights and mitigated by not issuing from a larger-than-life-size head...

...Where the film irrecoverably falls down, however, is in the acting and directing...

...How much of a film's success depends on the vagaries of release...

...Better start with a dog than end with one...

...Whenever the movie reaches its "Supreme Fright Points" these devices, by blinking and buzzing right off the screen, will alert the "weak-of-heart" to run, hide or "face the consequences...

...And when the occasional bathetic badinage is underlined by Alex North's banal and inappropriate score-the final scene, sentimentally directed and played, features marshmallowy passages for the cello that would bring tears to the eyes of a Rostropovich, and nobody else'sthe result is stultifying...

...That leaves Haskell Wexler's photography, craftsmanlike despite a slight overindulgence in chiaroscuro, and the astute art direction of Richard Sylbert and set decoration by James Hopkins...

...of historicity...

...or Honey dancing by herself, staged like the village idiot trying to impersonate Isadora Duncan...

...Elizabeth Taylor, on the other hand, is a total flop...

...We have all talked and written ourselves out on the subject of the play, and there is enough to worry about in the movie...

...For this the stage is indispensable: the single set slowly hardening into a cage...

...Made up to look middle-aged and frumpish, she remains a pretty, soulless child, the age and slovenliness painted on, and even the fat, though genuine, looking like baby-fat on her...

...The voice and accent are, as always, those of a spoiled and untutored brat (this is supposed to be a college president's daughter, aged 52...

...Whole scenes are hammily conceived...

...Albee's play was, barring the inept metaphysics and the unconvincing business about the imaginary child, an effective piece of theater, full of ugly but potent humor, cutting or at least sideswiping language, venomous but believable characterizations, and generally convincing bedlam...

...But I suppose the Fear Flasher would have been mistaken for one of the director's arty light effects, and the Horror Horn for Elizabeth Taylor's voice...

...Mike Nichols has done some extremely inventive directing for the stage, but always in the medium of cabaret or comedy...

...the actors simply and unselfconsciously there -as a fence, livestock, or the sound of footsteps is there...

...Among the participants only Richard Burton can be dignified with the term performer...

...The mere fact of the film adaptation smacks of the supererogatory: Virginia Woolf is not the sort of work that can bear much repetition...

...In the scene in which the Nazis come and get, not him, as it turns out, but a friendly young neighbor couple, and his reaction is frantic laughter with just a hint in it of sobs, the camera abuts on ultimate revelation...

...As for George Segal's Nick, he is one-sided and obvious...

...Both pictures have the same naive honesty which does not preclude an almost innocent tendentiousness ("Look how good we Czechs were to the Jews...

...And there are several more such scenes in Jiri Weiss's film, scenes that are not to be trifled with...

...Miss Dennis acts, from beginning to end, demented, but demented in the most simperingly phoney way, so that the always tenuous boundary between the worst kind of method acting and raving madness disappears altogether...

...In the film, the scenarist Ernest Lehman chose to spring this confinement by transposing parts of the action to other rooms, the garden, a speeding car, a roadhouse...

...here he is doubly transplanted: to film and to drama...

...We are treated to the choicest directorial commonplaces, from a naked light bulb swinging and casting ominous shadows to the ring at the end of a window shade (or was it a chain lamp...

...who would have the heart to confront such well-meaning pseudodocuments with the "Hmm...

...a somewhat homemade or thrift-shop look, and passionate but not unbridled humanitarianism...

...Except that the place looked much more like that of an English professor than that of a historian (photographs of Marianne Moore and Isak Dinesen, books like Edith Sitwell's autobiography, Catch 22, The Tin Drum, and a copy of The Paris Review), the sets and properties joined with gusto academic clutter to slatternly topsy-turviness...

...Or consider the needlessly obvious silhouettes-on-window-shades shots for Nick's and Martha's sex bout...

...Sweet Light tells of a young Aryan student's hiding a Jewish girl in a storage room, of their nascent love as he risks his life by harboring her, of their shy hopes surrounded by murderous madness, of the boy's mother's revealing to the girl the danger she represents, and of her composed departure into death...

...But at least he does not fumble...

...the direction fallible but with many penetrations into the dark heart of things...

...nervously jiggling away...

...The part calls for a simple, dull girl who gradually uncovers a cache of hysteria, only to revert to superficial wholesomeness again...

...from a neon arrow flashing on and off behind an irate head to a revolving disc of colored lights drenching dancers in black and white-what a waste of a grand color platitude...

...Where the essence is repartee -and not, as in Wilde, for example, repartee plus style-the jokes and surprises use themselves up...

...This is not the place to analyze why that fictitious son, or, at any rate, the way he is used, is psychologically unsound and dramatically dishonest...

...Actually, Shop is rather less good than has been claimed, whereas Sweet Light is considerably better...

...But film is otherwise unkind to this play...

...Martha, whom Uta Hagen made so richly, rottenly ripe is here still in the throes of a difficult puberty: Except for the tinny nastiness, it might as well be National Velvet Rides Again...

...and how the ending is a sop to the public's yen for a more or less edifying message...

...unlike major works of art, this one palls...

...the one, for instance, in which George goes to get a toy gun with which he pretends to shoot his wife...

...The film as a whole is unmemorable and so is each of its scenes...

...why the metaphysicizing-for the most part omitted from the movie, anyway-is bogus...

...Because of its prominent place in an impoverished theater, many people saw it twice, or saw it and read it, and that is about enough...

...Perhaps instead of making Virginia Woolf, Warner Brothers should have filmed Flush...

...As Honey, Sandy Dennis accomplishes the well-nigh impossible feat -oh, let's be generous, the quite impossible feat-of being worse yet...

...Clearly, Miss Taylor has been coached down to every intake of breath and flutter of eyelashes...

...Where George Grizzard, on stage, brought out an iridescent variety of emotional coloration under the outward innocuousness, Segal takes us only from nonentity to loutishness and back to nonentity again, which may well be the last remaining nickel ride...

...Burton broods over his sarcasm rather than brandishing it, and when Martha kicks her hatred at him, he plays goal keeper rather than opposing center forward...

...This may be cinematic necessity...

...Though he makes George yet another one of his underwater creations, a diver descending ever more deeply into a sea of nausea while little bubbles of contempt and self-hate rise to the surface, he is at least repeating a performance, if not creating one...

...Thomas Mann once mused about a film adaptation of his Royal Highness: "It should succeed...

...In the play, too, this is meant to produce a brief scare, but here the fetching and carrying of the weapon are milked for a prolonged melodramatic effect unworthy of either the wit or the seriousness of the context...

...The dialogue is uninspired but felt and persuasive, the cinematography unsophisticated but as compelling as a painting by a good primitive...

...Burton's mannerisms have become predictable, and he lacks the demonic quality with which Arthur Hill so brilliantly invested the part on Broadway-weakness, yes, but one that knows how to smash its image in the mirror of another's weakness...

...Why Mike Nichols' directorial hand-or, at the very least, a straitjacket-never clamps down on her remains a mystery...

...the gestures are even more regressive...

...but behind those robot-like mechanics there is no discernible human being...

...It is to be regretted Warner did not develop this device in time for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, which aside from being generally mediocre, has enough Supreme Fright Points to have benefited from such warnings...

...Indeed, the NCOMP, which stands for National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures, and not, as you might have thought, for non compos mentis, allowed the picture to squeeze by because of that terminal uplift...

...On screen, some of the shoddier bits of Albee's writing emerge shoddier yet...

...There are rewarding parts in it, even the infallible one of a beautiful dog...

...But all that is small comfort...