7.9 | / 10 |
Users | 1.5 | |
Reviewer | 5.0 | |
Overall | 4.3 |
Martha and her professor husband, George, invite a younger couple for drinks after a faculty party.
Starring: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, George Segal, Sandy Dennis, Frank FlanaganDrama | 100% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.77:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono (48kHz, 24-bit)
French: Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono (192 kbps)
German: Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Spanish: Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono (192 kbps)
Spanish: Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono (192 kbps)
Czech: Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Polish: Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Japanese: Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
BDInfo & PowerDVD corrected. All other tracks are (192 kbps). Spanish=Latin & Castillian; Japanese is hidden
English SDH, French, German SDH, Japanese, Spanish, Czech, Korean, Polish, Romanian, Thai, Turkish
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region free
Movie | 5.0 | |
Video | 5.0 | |
Audio | 5.0 | |
Extras | 4.5 | |
Overall | 5.0 |
There are many reasons why Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a landmark film. It was the first
feature directed by Mike Nichols, inaugurating a career that would encompass The Graduate,
The Birdcage and Carnal Knowledge. It was the first film to have its entire credited cast
nominated for Oscars and the second in history to be nominated in every category for which it
was eligible (thirteen in all, with five wins). It ushered in a new era of frankness in Hollywood's
treatment of mature subject matter, dealing a death blow to the Production Code (often called
"the Hays Code") that had governed America's screens since 1930. It was the first film to carry
an explicit warning that no one under 18 would be admitted without an accompanying adult.
Statistics aside, though, Virginia Woolf remains a vital work today, fifty years after its initial
release, because an unlikely group of collaborators successfully translated Edward Albee's
original play to the screen with the same furious intensity that first electrified audiences in 1962.
Albee's play continues to be revived, restaged and reinterpreted (twice on Broadway in the last
twelve years), but Nichols' film has become an essential part of the drama's lore. No other
classic of the American stage has received a more effective translation to the screen.
For Virginia Woolf's fiftieth anniversary, the Warner Archive Collection has rescanned and
restored the film for Blu-ray and accompanied it with the wealth of extras assembled for the 2006
DVD special edition.
The original cinematographer for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Harry Stradling, Sr.
(Suspicion) was fired during pre-production and
replaced by Haskell Wexler (Bound for Glory),
who won an Oscar for the film's expressive black-and-white images. Accordingly to Wexler,
Stradling lost the job after telling director Mike Nichols that he hated Fellini's 8½ , whose style
Nichols wanted to emulate.
Virginia Woolf was made in an era when release prints were indiscriminately struck directly from
the original camera negative, which had sustained significant damage by the time the studio
began its film preservation efforts many years later. Those efforts led to the creation of a fine-grain master
positive, which Warner's MPI facility has newly scanned (at 2K) for this 1080p, AVC-encoded
Blu-ray. Substantial restoration was performed in the digital domain to repair damage and
remove dirt and scratches.
The Blu-ray image is superb. Wexler's lighting creates a sense of depth that is essential to
Nichols' expressive arrangement of the characters in physical space. The solid blacks, well-delineated shades of gray and finely rendered film grain
reveal exceptional detail throughout
George's and Martha's unkempt home in a decaying campus house, where Richard Sylbert's
Oscar-winning production design tells you as much about their marriage as Albee's dialogue.
(When Martha famously declares the place a "dump", you can see just what she means.) Faces
are vividly displayed, revealing tiny flickers of reaction and shifts of emotion. Some of Wexler's
shots are almost painterly in their rendering of mood (e.g., the long shot of George sitting alone
on a swing; see screenshot #14). Even the pedestrian decor of the roadhouse location makes a
contribution; its banality contrasts sharply with the events that prompt Honey to squeal
"Violence!" with delight.
Having transferred and restored Virginia Woolf with care, WAC has mastered it on Blu-ray with
its usual high average bitrate of just under 35 Mbps and an excellent encode.
Virginia Woolf's mono soundtrack has been restored from the original magnetic tracks and encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0, with identical left and right channels. The dialogue has been faithfully and clearly rendered, including those portions where Nichols and editor Sam O'Steen deliberately overlapped speakers (a rarity in American films at the time). The track features numerous small sound effects, many of which are meant to register subliminally: the clink of glasses, the rattling of ice cubes, the repeated pouring of drinks. An occasional effect registers forcefully for dramatic purpose (e.g., the ringing of chimes that awakens Honey at the top of the third act, or the sudden lurch of the car when the foursome veers off to the roadhouse). All of these sounds have been artfully layered into the mix to sound like natural occurrences. Alex North (Spartacus) provided the spare score, which contains almost no recurring themes. It's more a collection of individual compositions, each one crafted to a specific moment in the drama.
Virginia Woolf has appeared on DVD multiple times, beginning with a 1997 release that included
a commentary by Haskell Wexler. That commentary also appeared on the 2006 two-disc edition
assembled for the "Elizabeth Taylor & Richard Burton Film Collection", which added a second
commentary and other new features. The two commentaries were included on a 2010 single-DVD reissue.
For Blu-ray, WAC has ported over all of the extras from the 2006 two-disc edition. It's an
impressive set.
"Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?" is a line that Albee once saw written in soap on the mirror
behind a bar. It struck him as "a rather typical university, intellectual joke", and years later he
incorporated it into a play set at a university, attributing the gag to an unidentified attendee at the
party preceding the action and later repeated by Martha, who finds it hilarious. (In the film as in
many stage productions, it is sung to the tune of "Here We Go 'Round the Mulberry Bush",
which is in the public domain, as opposed to "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?", which must
be licensed from Disney.) Much ink has been spilled attempting to identify deep meaning in the
joke's literary reference, but it resists any definitive interpretation, which, I suspect, is why it
appealed to Albee. By the end of Virginia Woolf, the laughter has vanished. Only the fear
remains. Highest recommendation.
1961
1963
Ansiktet
1958
1966
1978
1947
En passion
1969
1974
Tystnaden
1963
Såsom i en spegel
1961
Riten / The Ritual
1969
2021
অপরাজিত / The Unvanquished
1956
Signed Limited Edition to 100 Copies - SOLD OUT
2015
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Du skal ære din hustru
1925
2014
Il portiere di notte
1974
طعم گيلاس / Ta'm e guilass
1997
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2012