Suddenly, Last Summer

Also from 1959 was Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Suddenly, Last Summer, with a screenplay by Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal, adapted from the one-act play by Williams. It is astonishingly lurid, but not in a high-toned way. The film starts with a lobotomy, and ends up skirting around the topics of incest, homosexuality, pedophilia and cannibalism. The effect for moviegoers must have been similar to a tourist trip to the Tenderloin.

The film starred three big names: Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, and Montgomery Clift. Hepburn is the eccentric but very wealthy Violet Venable of New Orleans. She offers to bestow a substantial amount of money to the local state mental asylum, who has just recruited a hot-shot neurosurgeon, Clift, who specializes in lobotomies. She will lend the money but there is a string attached--Clift must treat her niece, Taylor, who lost her mind while vacationing with Hepburn's son, who died on the same trip. It seems that Taylor saw something when the son died that traumatized her, and Hepburn wants her brain operated on so she will never bring it public.

Clift examines Taylor, and realizes she's not insane. Like a detective, he tries to piece together the mystery of how Sebastian, Hepburn's son, really died. Hepburn lionizes her son in an unseemly fashion, and eventually we learn that she procured young men for her son to play with. When she grew too old to do so, he took Taylor instead. In a coastal village in Spain something went horribly wrong.

This film plays like a parody of Williams. There's some brilliant metaphors, especially in a monologue of Hepburn's about baby sea turtles trying to make it to the sea before being eaten by birds, but most of this is eye-rollingly laughable. Clift, who had suffered from a serious accident a few years earlier, is stiff and probably doped out of his mind. Hepburn is very good, in a transition to the roles she would end up playing in her later years like Mary Tyrone and Elinor of Aquitaine. Taylor makes a very fetching mental patient (she is allowed to roam the hospital freely wearing her own clothes, which was probably a decision not to have her dressed in an unflattering smock the whole time). She also looks damn good in a white bathing suit. Both women were nominated for Oscars.

It's intriguing to posit that Williams is just playing a good joke on us all. Apparently there was a real incident that took place in Morocco when local youths tore apart a man who had been seducing them. It all seems to be a kind of self-loathing homosexuality, as the character of Sebastian, who is exalted by his mother, is slowly revealed to be a degenerate. There is nothing rewarding or insightful by any of this, instead it leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth.