Suddenly, Last Summer **** (1959, Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, Montgomery Clift) -Classic Movie Review 2613

‘Tennessee Williams shocks you again as he transports you to a STRANGE, NEW BOLD WORLD!’ Tennessee Williams’s famous one-act play gets a glossy, starry stage-to-screen transfer in director Joseph L Mankiewicz’s 1959 movie. The heat is turned up on the big performances and moody atmosphere, but, understandably for its era, the heat is turned down on the homosexuality and cannibalism. What an odd piece this is!

Montgomery Clift stars as young New Orleans mental hospital brain surgeon Dr Cukrowicz. The question he wants answered is whatever happened to a gay poet on a foreign visit with cousin Catherine Holly (Elizabeth Taylor), whose wealthy widowed aunt, Mrs Violet Venable (Katharine Hepburn), wants him to perform a lobotomy on her to cover up the truth.

She thinks that Catherine is defiling the memory of her son, the poet Sebastian, by babbling about his mysterious death, which she witnessed while they were on holiday together in Spain last summer. What Catherine saw was so appalling that she’s gone mad.

The actors seem to be enjoying the bizarre material enormously and encourage us to do the same. Williams and Gore Vidal collaborate on carving out a sympathetic screenplay, though it is a shade over-extended at 114 minutes. Also, of course, it is a pity it was filmed in the hypocritical 1950s when people wouldn’t call a spade a spade. Even so, it was ultra-frank for its day, and the film-makers were given special dispensation in America so that Sebastian’s homosexuality could be ‘inferred, but not shown’.

But otherwise, this is fascinating stuff, with three iconic great stars in their prime, and a fine support cast to back them up: Albert Dekker, Mercedes McCambridge, Gary Raymond, Mavis Villiers, Patricia Marmont, Joan Young, Maria Britneva, Sheila Robbins and David Cameron.

It was shot at Shepperton Studios, near London. The play was paired with the far less well-known Something Unspoken when originally presented off Broadway.  The double bill was presented under the title of Garden District and opened on January 7 1958 at the York Playhouse in New York. It was remade for British TV in 1992, with Maggie Smith, Natasha Richardson and Rob Lowe.

It was the only film for which Taylor or Hepburn competed with a co-star for the same Best Actress Academy Award. However, the award went to Simone Signoret for Room at the Top. Taylor did however win the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture Actress – Drama.

US film critic Bosley Crowther wrote a scathing review denouncing the film as the work of degenerates obsessed with rape, incest, homosexuality and cannibalism. Gore Vidal thought this made audiences flock to the film. John Wayne denounced it as ‘poison polluting Hollywood’s moral bloodstream’.

Patricia Neal played the lead role to so much acclaim on the London stage she was sure she would be given the Taylor part in the film adaptation.

Vidal and Williams’s partner Frank Merlo are glimpsed observing Clift operate in the opening sequence. Taylor’s husband Eddie Fisher appears uncredited as one of street urchins who beg her for bread.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2613

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