So this is the next movie up on the AFI list. As I go through this list, there are some movies where I know roughly what to expect, and others where I have literally no idea what the heck the movie is. This is absolutely the latter. (Which actually, a surprising thing is that this wasn’t on the original 1997 AFI list, but came in for the 2007 one — I can’t imagine that the profile of this movie went up in those ten years, so genuinely kind of baffling there.)

At any rate, it turns out that this is a movie adaptation of a “famous” play by the same name, which was a huge deal on its release in 1962; and the movie is doubly famous because Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were two of the biggest stars in the world (and also scandalously together as of their last film, Cleopatra). So this was a huge deal at the time — third-highest grossing film of 1966, nominated for an Academy Award in literally every category possible back then, like really a big deal.

Which is super-weird, because it’s a black-and-white movie about two couples mostly just drinking and talking uncomfortably. If it were made today, it would absolutely be a tiny little indie film.

So the plot of the movie is that at 2 AM, after a big soiree, Liz Taylor (the daughter of the dean of what is presumably a small Northeastern college) invites over a new professor and his wife to continue the party with her and her college-professor husband (Burton).

To emphasize this: It is 2 AM. They are already completely schnockered. And the movie is just starting. After the second couple arrives, they will all have more drinks. Many more drinks. So, yeah, everyone in this movie is stone-cold drunk for the entire running time.

And so what do you get when you take the cloistered environment of a WASPy college, stir in two married couples, and then add like seventy gallons of liquor late at night? Drama, that’s what.

This is an actor’s playhouse, because everything is just ramped to eleven at all times. There’s big monologues, there’s angry diatribes, there’s quiet confessionals, there’s witty banter, there’s cutting insults, there’s moments of quiet vulnerability. It’s just this huge gamut from the intense to the subtle, sometimes both at once.

And so over the course of the movie, gradually the illusions that these couples have are stripped away, and we come to understand their various miseries and failures. Mostly. Because tbh, the Burton/Taylor couple is really weird, and it’s hard to tell how much they’re just fucking around and how much their emotions are genuine at any given point. Like, they’re definitely telling some level of lies, it’s just not clear where the lies stop.

As a very stagey, dialogue-heavy actor showcase kinda film, this does work. The characters are played perfectly by all the actors, such that even though the characters and situations are all super-heightened dramatically, they feel groundedly real.

(Except for one thing, which I suspect is just a matter of different mores across time: After having many many many many drinks, they get in a car and go to a bar to dance. This isn’t even borderline drunk driving, they are completely hammered, and yet none of them even blink at the idea of doing this. Also, apparently somehow there is a bar still open at what must be like 3 AM or later? Maybe Connecticut or wherever has weirdly lax liquor laws, idk.)

The whole “dramatic college professors” premise feels very twencen literary novel in a kinda dated way, but this really is well-executed; on the whole, it’s one of the more interesting of the AFI movies so far. Recommended.