"My son Sebastian and I... We left behind us a trail of days like a gallery of sculpture until suddenly, last summer..."
- Mrs. Violet Venable (Katharine Hepburn), "Suddenly, Last Summer" (1959)
Written and researched by Michael Hadley
Suddenly, Last Summer
THE STORY TAKES PLACE IN 1937 IN A NEW ORLEANS MENTAL ASYLUM. The plot centers on a psychiatric doctor evaluating a female patient who, by the direction of her wealthy aunt, is now a lobotomy candidate after witnessing the mysterious death of her male cousin while traveling in Spain the previous summer.
The film was based on a one-act play of the same name that opened off-Broadway in January 1958 as part of a double-bill with another one-act play called "Something Unspoken." Both plays were written by Tennessee Williams. The theatrical presentation of the two plays was given the overall title "Garden District."
Gore Vidal and Williams co-wrote the screenplay which added several new supporting characters and expanded the original play considerably. Filming took place during the summer of 1959 at London's Shepperton Studios, while location footage was shot in Mallorca, Spain (part of the Balearic Island chain in the Mediterranean Sea).
Columbia Pictures released "Suddenly, Last Summer" in December 1959. It was directed by the estimable Joseph L. Mankiewicz whose previous directing and writing credits included the classic films "All About Eve" and "A Letter to Three Wives." He also directed "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir," "No Way Out," "Guys and Dolls" and the ill-fated 1962 version of "Cleopatra" also starring Elizabeth Taylor.
SOURCES: Wikipedia, Backstory/Production Notes, Turner Classic Movies Website, IMDB
TRAILER
Montgomery Clift (Dr. Cukrowicz) is about to meet Katharine Hepburn (Mrs. Violet Venable) for the first time.
Elizabeth Taylor as Catherine Holly who witnesses the death of her cousin Sebastian, suddenly, last summer, while they were on holiday.
Mankiewicz assembled a stellar trio of charismatic actors to play the leading roles: Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift and Katharine Hepburn.
At the time of filming, Taylor had become the toast of the tabloids because of her scandalous affair with pop singer Eddie Fisher. Taylor, after the tragic death of husband Mike Todd in an airplane crash in 1958, became romantically involved with her husband's best friend, Fisher, who was married to America's sweetheart, Debbie Reynolds. The subsequent headlines temporarily eclipsed the fact that Taylor was indeed a fine dramatic actress, which she demonstrated the year before in her searing portrayal of "Maggie the Cat" in the film version of Williams' "Cat On A Hot Tin Roof."
Taylor took the central role of Catharine Holly, who became the traveling companion of her enigmatic cousin and poet Sebastian when he vacationed along the Southern coast of Spain. Catherine's memory holds the key to unlocking the mystery surrounding her cousin's tragic demise. Her shocking and salacious account of his death has prompted her aunt to push for a lobotomy to stop her from ruining her son's reputation and preserve her own highly romanticized memories of her son.
SOURCES: Wikipedia and IMDB.
Montgomery Clift accepted the role of Dr. Cukrowicz after starring in a number of critically successful films that included "Red River", "A Place in the Sun" and "From Here to Eternity". He was considered a first rate dramatic actor who possessed the good looks and "method acting" style of Marlon Brando. Unfortunately, Clift had suffered serious injuries in a 1956 car crash that crushed his face and made him dependent on prescription drugs and alcohol to manage the chronic pain. Although his face was rebuilt surgically, the emotional scars from the crash haunted him for the rest of his life. He also maintained an enduring and close friendship with co-star Elizabeth Taylor, who was credited with helping save his life after the car crash.
SOURCE: "Montgomery Clift: A Biography" by Patricia Bosworth.
Katharine Hepburn, after a long line of impressive comedic performances opposite Spencer Tracy, signed on to play the important role of Violet Venable, a wealthy widow and potential benefactor to the state-maintained asylum. This was Hepburn's first film since the 1957 release of "Desk Set" and she brought a refined presence to the role that pleased Williams enormously. He was quoted as saying: "I love her diction. She makes all my lines sound better than I thought they would."
SOURCES: IMBD and "Katharine Hepburn: I Know Where I'm Going: A Personal Biography" by Charlotte Chandler
According to Garson Kanin's book "Tracy and Hepburn" and Patricia Bosworth's biography of Clift, Hepburn demonstrated her famously forthright personality by denouncing director Mankiewicz's harsh treatment of Montgomery Clift during filming. Both books claim that once Hepburn confirmed all of her scenes had been completed satisfactorily, she spat at Mankiewicz to show him how just she felt about him. Bosworth goes on to report that she also spat on the office floor of producer Sam Spiegel to make sure her feelings were clear.
SOURCES: IMDB and the Kanin / Bosworth books
Awards
Both Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor were nominated for the Best Actress Academy Award, but the Oscar that year went to Simone Signoret for her performance in "Room At The Top." The film was also nominated for Best Art Direction for the work of Oliver Messel, William Kellner and Scott Simon. Taylor and Hepburn were nominated for Best Actress Golden Globe awards and Taylor won. Taylor also won the Laurel Award for Top Female Dramatic Performance.
SOURCE: Wikipedia
Mendacity, mental illness, greed, homosexuality and the toxic effects of self-serving mothers...
"Suddenly, Last Summer" features themes that are familiar to Williams devotees including mendacity, mental illness, greed, homosexuality and the toxic effects of self-serving mothers who put financial opportunity and personal vanity ahead of their children.
The screenplay makes a strong case for those who are unable to defend themselves when they are at their most fragile. This theme hits home when you consider that "Williams was very close to his sister Rose, a slim beauty who was diagnosed with schizophrenia at a young age. As was common then, Rose was institutionalized and spent most of her adult life in mental hospitals. When therapies were unsuccessful, she showed more paranoid tendencies. In an effort to treat her, Williams' parents authorized a prefrontal lobotomy, a drastic treatment that was thought to help some mental patients who suffered extreme agitation. Performed in 1937 at the Missouri State Sanitarium, the operation incapacitated Rose for the rest of her life. Her surgery may have contributed to his alcoholism and his dependence on various combinations of amphetamines and barbiturates."
There are numerous references to the predatory aspects of nature in the film. Perhaps the most blatant is the Venus Flytrap that Sebastian kept in the elaborate "jungle" garden in the backyard of his mother's home. Violet makes an elaborate point of how voracious the plant is and how expensive it is to feed it with the flies she has flown in specifically for that purpose. She refers to the plant as "our lady" and says "the lady exudes this marvelous perfume which attracts them [the flies]. They plunge into her chalice. And they never come out." This section is perhaps a direct reference to Williams feelings about his mother with whom he had a difficult and strained relationship.
The pivotal character of Sebastian remains a puzzling cipher to most viewers. At the time the film was completed, the censors insisted on softening the homosexual theme and the gruesome details of his demise at the hands of a gang of starving street urchins. Screenwriter Vidal reported in Vito Russo's book "The Celluloid Closet" and subsequent documentary that the censors of the day, especially the Catholic Legion of Decency, forced him to edit much of the dialogue so that the homosexual theme is only implied, and that the actual homosexual character does not have a face or a voice in the film.
Vidal credited New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther with the financial success of the film. Crowther wrote a scathing review denouncing the film as the work of degenerates obsessed with rape, incest, homosexuality, and cannibalism among other qualities. Vidal believed advertising such salacious detail made audiences flock in droves to the film.
Written and researched by Michael Hadley
SOURCES: Wikipedia, TCM and IMDB
Additional Material from Classic Films Reloaded:
Catherine recalls the events surrounding the death of cousin Sebastian - suddenly, last summer:
Spoiler alert: this is almost the end - don't watch if you haven't seen the film and plan to watch it on DVD.
Hepburn vs. Mankiewicz: Hepburn had her own ideas about how to play her part and clashed often with her director.
Hepburn with director Joseph L. Mankiewicz and, right, with Clift and Mankiewicz.
"Katharine Hepburn plays the arch and airy dowager with what looks like a stork's nest on her head." Bosley Crowther, New York Times
According to Mankiewicz's biographer Kenneth L. Geist - Pictures Will Talk: The Life and Films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Sources: Kenneth L. Geist, Joseph L. Mankiewicz Tribute: SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER
FOOTNOTE: I met Mankiewicz's biographer, Ken Geist in London, soberly, last summer. I told him how much I'd enjoyed reading his book on Mankiewicz - he'd given me a copy on a previous trip to sample the delights of the London stage. "Did you know him very well?" I asked. He thought for a few seconds and replied, "Enough to dislike him." He then had to leave so I was unable to discover what lay behind his intriguing answer. However, I hope to at some time in the future - perhaps suddenly, next summer... - Bryan James
"Suddenly, Last Summer sparked a bonfire of disgusted protest in 1959"
"If it's camp you want, it's camp you'll get, as when Monty gives a blond male nurse a visible once-over, or when Liz starts struggling with a locked door in the wrong place at the wrong time, triply imprisoned by an iron-barred causeway, an expressionist camera angle, and a triangulated bra. The movie makes it so easy for conservative culture vultures to tear away at it, like the flesh-eating birds that feast on baby sea turtles in one of Hepburn's centerpiece monologues. Tear they did: Suddenly, Last Summer sparked a bonfire of disgusted protest in 1959, but the movie, even more than the play, belongs in that beastly menagerie with Faulkner's Sanctuary, Pasolini's Salò, and Mary Harron's film of American Psycho, aggressively vulgar works in which a hard, proud skeleton of social critique and complex implication is nonetheless palpable, even to viewers as green as I was at age 15, when I first saw the movie.
... there is something remarkably formidable about Suddenly, Last Summer. It makes you chuckle, sometimes against its own interests, but it also lingers like few "better" films ever do, and in that way at least, it's a better Williams film than those bashfully catered affairs that Richard Brooks whipped up out of Cat and Sweet Bird. Just you try flossing it from your mind."
READ MORE: NICK'S FLICKS PICKS
By BOSLEY CROWTHER
Published: December 23, 1959
WHATEVER horrifying import there may have been in Tennessee Williams' short play, "Suddenly, Last Summer," when it was acted on the stage, has been drained out of it through tedious talking and a terminal showdown that is irritatingly obscure in the close to two-hour film version of it that opened at the Criterion and the Sutton last night.
People who leap to conclusions may assume the trouble is that Sam Spiegel and his crew that made the picture were compelled to go easy with the ugly words. They may suspect that because the true nature of the most-talked-of character could not be tagged (he was obviously a homosexual, as well as a sadist of some sort, in the play) and because the precise and horrible details of his death could not be explained (he was literally eaten by urchins), the point of it all is missed.
There's no doubt that a great deal of the feeling of dank corruption that ran through the play has been lost or pitifully diluted by a tactful screening of the words. And certainly what should be thoroughly shocking in the flash-back scenes of the focal character's death is only confusing and baffling, because you can't really see what's happening, and the lady who is describing the occasion is much less vivid and exact than she could be.
But, in this viewer's estimation, the main trouble with this picture is that an idea that is good for not much more than a blackout is stretched to exhausting length and, for all its fine cast and big direction, it is badly, pretentiously played.
In structure, as well as in content, the drama is a simple mystery, a psychological whodunit—or howdunit, to be exact. A touchy and skeptical young brain surgeon is patiently trying to find why a wealthy Louisiana dowager insists that her pretty young niece is insane and can be helped only by having a lobotomy, a section cut out of her brain.
After talking interminably to the dowager and later to the niece, then to both of them together and to other people at different times, he discovers there is friction between the females on account of the dowager's dead son. It seems the fellow was inseparable from his mother until he suddenly, last summer, took up with the niece and "died" while on a trip with her in Europe. How did the fellow die?
He died from being set upon by urchins. This fact eventually comes out when the niece, under the effects of a "truth serum" (like a character in a cheap thriller), blabs it out, shrieking and tossing in torment. This cures her and drives the dowager mad.
But this offers no valid solutions. It does not tell how the urchins killed the man, to justify frequent mention that it was "horrid and obscene." It does not tell why they did it, other than to suggest that they were "hungry," which is a feeble explanation and gastronomically far-fetched. And it certainly does not complete an image, made much of by the dowager early along, that vultures swooping down upon young turtles and devouring them reveal the cruel "face of God."
Mr. Williams and Gore Vidal, who helped him prepare his play for the screen, have indulged in sheer verbal melodramatics which have small effect on the screen and are barely elevated from tedium by some incidental scenes of inmates of a mental institution.
The acting is small compensation. Elizabeth Taylor is rightly roiled as the niece, but her wallow in agony at the climax is sheer histrionic showing off. Katharine Hepburn plays the arch and airy dowager with what looks like a stork's nest on her head and such bony and bumptious posturing that she acts a Mary Petty caricature. Montgomery Clift seems racked with pain and indifference as the brain surgeon; Albert Dekker growls and gropes as his dull boss, and Mercedes McCambridge and Gary Raymond do a routine—a vaudeville routine—as the mother and brother of the girl.
Joseph L. Mankiewicz' direction is strained and sluggish, as is, indeed, the whole conceit of the drama. It should have been left to the off-Broadway stage.
BOSLEY CROWTHER
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