This Day in Film History (‘Virginia Woolf’ Erodes Censorship Barriers)

June 21, 1966—Mike Nichols was so worried about the reaction to his film directing debut, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, that he left the Pantages Theater early with the movie’s editor, Sam O'Steen.

Nichols need not have been concerned about the popular or critical reception to his adaptation of one of the most acclaimed yet controversial plays of the postwar period. 

With the draw of real-life couple Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, this scalding marital drama may have been, at $7.5 million, the most expensive black-and-white movie ever produced, but its $10.3 million box-office take ensured profits for Warner Bros.

Over the winter, Hollywood poured more honors on the film, with 13 Academy Award nominations, including for every category in which it was eligible—the first time this had occurred since Cimarron in 1931. Subsequently, wins went to Taylor (her second Best Actress win), Sandy Dennis for Best Supporting Actress, and Haskell Wexler for Best Cinematography.

From the moment Edward Albee’s play opened on Broadway in 1962, it was considered a hot property—but also, in some quarters, too hot to handle. Its frequently profane language and sexual explicitness unnerved the trustees of Columbia University enough that they overruled the recommendation of its Pulitzer Prize panel that the award go to the playwright.

Acquiring the property was unusual for Jack L. Warner, an aging mogul with conservative tastes that increasingly veered towards prestige musical blockbusters like My Fair Lady and Camelot.

At least sone among the studio hierarchy felt qualms about the finished product, which retained much of Albee’s incendiary dialogue. At one early screening, Life Magazine reported, one Warner executive groaned when the lights came up, "My God! We have a $7 million dirty movie on our hands!"

They were right to be concerned. Though the Production Code that had restricted profanity and sex onscreen for the prior three decades was coming under increasing fire from filmmakers and critics, it still presented roadblocks.

The Catholic Legion of Decency, which aimed to identify and boycott any movie it deemed morally objectionable, represented an especially significant roadblock to widespread distribution and popular acceptance of the film. Archbishops and priests promoted pledges by the faithful to avoid any cinema that the organization condemned.

Nichols had fought constantly with screenwriter Ernest Lehman to stick as closely as possible to Albee’s original dialogue and plot. He had survived being removed when generous starting hours for Taylor and Burton left the production 30 days behind schedule and with double the budget. He was not about to let the picture sink before it had a good chance of being seen by the public.

When the 80 judges for the Catholic Legion panel met, Nichols promised Warner execs, he would have his good friend Jacqueline Kennedy—practically a venerated figure after her husband’s assassination—sit behind prominent clerics like “Monsignor What’s-His-Face” and pronounce at the picture’s conclusion, “How Jack would have loved it."

The plot worked, as the Legion assigned Virginia Woolf a new rating—A-IV (“morally unobjectionable for adults, with reservations")—which took into account the work’s moral seriousness while signifying that its often scabrous language and subject matter were not for the squeamish.

After haggling with Warner Bros. over its content, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) used a similar strategy as the Legion, designating the film as the first to bear the notice, "No one under 18 will be admitted unless accompanied by his parent." Its first attempt at a rating system followed two years later.

While the censorship walls crumbled rapidly on the nation’s cinemas in the late 1960s, it took a bit longer for the old restrictions to fade on television. I well remember the first time the film aired on CBS in February 1973.

Then 13 years old, I wondered exactly what was being signaled when the “Tiffany Network” issued its pre-viewing disclaimer urging parents and “sensitive viewers” to use “judgment and discretion.” I soon received what The New York Times’ Howard Thompson termed “an adult earful.”

Nowadays, in whatever medium it appears, it is seldom that such editorial handwringing occurs. Although CBS aired the show starting at 9 pm, when many kiddies would be fast asleep, Turner Classic Movies, for instance, has been known to show it during daytime. 

(A waggish filmmaking friend of mine once noted that TCM never had to worry about children watching their movies, as the cable channel’s average viewing age was 65!)

Viewers who couldn’t get beyond the blistering language that caused so much sturm und drang were likely to miss the symbolism of the names given the feuding, sadistic middle-aged academic couple at the heart of the play and film: George and Martha.

Like the first American President and his wife, Albee’s couple were unable to conceive—certainly not a baby, perhaps only drink-induced disorder and destruction among fellow academics ostensibly oriented towards reason.

Song Lyric of the Day (Elaine May, With an Improvised Tune About ‘The Brothers Karamazov’)

“There was dashing Dmitri, elusive Ivan

And Alyosha with the laughing eyes.

Then came the dawn,

The brothers were gone

I just can't forget those wonderful guys.”—Movie starlet Barbara Musk (played by Elaine May), to disc jockey Jack Ego (played by Mike Nichols), singing lyrics from her new musical adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, performed during their 1960 improv show An Evening With Mike Nichols and Elaine May, quoted in Sam Wasson, Improv Nation: How We Made a Great American Art (2017)

(Press photo of Elaine May during a stage comedy performance with improv partner Mike Nichols, December 1958.)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Graduate,’ When the Cougar Became Cool)

Benjamin Braddock (played by Dustin Hoffman): “Oh my God!”

Mrs. Robinson (played by Anne Bancroft): “Pardon?”

Benjamin: “Oh no, Mrs. Robinson. Oh no.”

Mrs. Robinson: “What's wrong?”

Benjamin: “Mrs. Robinson, you didn't... I mean, you didn't expect...”

Mrs. Robinson: “What?”

Benjamin: “I mean, you didn't really think I'd do something like that.”

Mrs. Robinson: “Like what?”

Benjamin: “What do you think?”

Mrs. Robinson: “Well, I don't know.”

Benjamin: “For god's sake, Mrs. Robinson. Here we are. You got me into your house. You give me a drink. You... put on music. Now you start opening up your personal life to me and tell me your husband won't be home for hours.”

Mrs. Robinson: “So?”

Benjamin: “Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to seduce me.”

Mrs. Robinson: [laughs] “Huh?”

Benjamin: “Aren't you?”—The Graduate (1967), screenplay by Calder Willingham and Buck Henry, based on the novel by Charles Webb, directed by Mike Nichols

Anne Bancroft played a heroine—Helen Keller’s indomitable teacher, Annie Sullivan, in her Oscar-winning turn in The Miracle Worker—but in The Graduate she virtually invented an archetype. Long before “Cougar Den” became a Saturday Night Live skit, or before Demi Moore, Susan Sarandon or other actresses of a certain age took up with younger men, she popularized the notion of the cougar in Mike Nichols’ film, which premiered on this date simultaneously in New York and Los Angeles.

It wasn’t the first time Hollywood had paired an older woman with a younger man, mind you: Sunset Boulevard, for instance, had Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond. But that didn’t have the pervasive influence on America’s sexual consciousness as The Graduate, for several reasons: 1) the Hollywood censorship code was still operating; 2) the hold that the silent-screen star had on screenwriter-gigolo Joe Gillis was monetary rather than sexual; 3) Desmond’s allure had faded a long time ago; and 4) she was, most of all, bonkers.

The above scene in Dustin Hoffman’s film debut couldn’t be more different from the one that Billy Wilder created. It’s the climax of a whole series of events (starting with one that Benjamin doesn’t mention here—Mrs. Robinson barging into his room at his own home, when he wants to escape from his party), all carefully orchestrated. Mrs. Robinson is insouciant, teasing, fake-innocent—utterly in control. Benjamin doesn’t stand a chance.

The blogger at Noir Whale picks up on one neat trick of the film: This scene was “textbook film noir, in a non-noir setting,” with Mrs. Robinson as the femme fatale and Benjamin as her helpless male prey. Yet the scene gains in daring because of its gender inversion of a familiar trope of film and literature (e.g., Les Liaisons Dangereuses): an older man cunningly, step by step, taking a young woman’s virginity.

For more than a few male viewers, the daring in all of this made Mrs. Robinson more desirable than her daughter. Elaine might have been beautiful, but she was young and innocent—and for a certain type of male, such a woman doesn’t have the appeal that a more experienced one does.

The film’s sleight of hand in this scene in regard to its principal figure (for make no mistake—Mrs. Robinson is not only the force that alters Benjamin’s aimless, frightened stasis in facing adulthood, but also the most complicated character in the movie) was as slick as its now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t nudity. In actuality, Bancroft was only six years older than Hoffman, who appeared younger than his 30 years.

Nichols might have been acclaimed as a harbinger of “The New Hollywood,” but in manipulating the age difference between Bancroft and Hoffman, he stood squarely in a tradition between Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (in which Jessie Royce Landis, just seven years older than Cary Grant, played his mother) and Robert Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump (in which Sally Field, just six years after playing Tom Hanks’ girlfriend in Punchline, now played his mom).

By today’s standards, The Graduate suggested far more than it showed in its scenes with Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson. But it had swung the pendulum far, far away from the likes of Dr. Dolittle (which, as I noted in a post from yesterday, premiered only the day before). Dr. Dolittle treated the animal kingdom; Mrs. Robinson, in her predatory inclinations, belonged to it. (At the time of shooting,  Nichols had been reading  Henry James’ “The Beast in the Jungle,” a novella about a young man waiting for an unusual destiny, and it inspired his decision to have Bancroft clad in animal prints).

One original choice for the role of Mrs. Robinson, Doris Day, might have been flying into the face of her wholesome stereotype had she appeared, but she could not see herself “rolling around in the sheets with a young man half my age.” Ava Gardner, who was also approached by Nichols about taking on the role, shared the character’s strong taste for alcohol and young men, but she took herself out of the running because she didn't consider herself much of an actress, thereby leaving the field open to Bancroft. The latter matched Stifler’s mom in American Pie as a comical cougar, but—in a sign of her greatness as an actress—brought infinitely greater shadings of disappointment and buried resentments.