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Broadway's own Richard Burton, star of Camelot and a fabled "Hamlet," married Elizabeth Taylor Hilton Wilding Todd Fisher in 1964 and almost permanently decamped to the movies. The pair, who had first tangled in 1963 in the ill-fated "Cleopatra," went on to team for a series of major films into the early '70s (by which point the partnership, and the marriage, headed on the rocks). Four of the films have now been packaged into the Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton: The Film Collection [Warner Home].

Only one of the films is especially good, but it is exceptionally good. The highlight is the "40th Anniversary Two-Disc Special Edition" of Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf." While the play was necessarily adapted for the screen (by Ernest Lehman) and thus is not quite the same as what you get on the stage, Taylor and Burton pack quite a punch. Eschewing the glamour of their public personae, "The 60's Most Famous On- and Off-Screen Couple" give true acting performances — arguably their finest (both individually and as a pair). Stand-up comic-turned-Broadway director Mike Nichols, in his first film, quickly demonstrated that he was a movie director all right. The play's cast is completed by Sandy Dennis (who, like Taylor, took an Oscar) and George Segal (who, like Burton, lost). Even now, 40 years and numerous revivals later, this "Virginia Woolf" is quite an adventure.

The other titles in the set are "The V.I.P.s" (1963), a Terrence Rattigan melodrama with Margaret Rutherford, Maggie Smith and Orson Welles in support; "The Sandpiper" (1965), a bit of a mess from Minnelli (Vincente) co-starring Eva Marie Saint; and "The Comedians" (1967), a Graham Greene thriller set against rebellion in Haiti, co-starring Alec Guinness and Peter Ustinov. Continued...