Die Die My Darling
by Silvio Narizzano
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Maurice Kaufmann, Peter Vaughan, Stefanie Powers, Tallulah Bankhead, Yootha JoyceDirector: Silvio Narizzano
Brand: Sony
DVD: Region Code 99
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 1.0; English (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 1.0
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: Anamorphic Widescreen, 1.85:1
Running Time: 97 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2003-08-12
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Movie Reviews of Die Die My Darling
Movie Review: Suddenly Last Summer with a different title
Summary: 5 Stars
I hope Tennessee Williams got a percentage when they released this Hammer horror film, because it's pretty much the exact same story as SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER, just changed a little to accommodate the limited acting range of my favorite, Stefanie Powers.
You'll remember SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER in which Elizabeth Taylor is clapped in a mental hospital awaiting a lobotomy, under the dire eye of Violet Venables (Katharine Hepburn). Taylor is a mess, but mostly she's in shock from the trauma of having gone to Mexico with Sebastian, Hepburn's adored and now deceased son. In DIE DIE MY DARLING (in England known as FANATIC), Powers is an American girl in England who takes the trouble to pay one last courtesy call to Tallulah Bankhead, the mother of her dead fiance, the man Powers was supposed to marry before his mysterious death. At the bottom of each picture, the secret remains the same, the homosexuality of the dead boy, the imprisonment and brainwashing of the girl who knows too much about it, and the anger of the mother who had her boy taken away from her, with all the promise of the dynasty continuing disappearing with him.
In each case Powers and Liz Taylor have a male champion who rides in at the last minute to save them from the evil mother's lobotomy/forced Christianity threat. Taylor had Montgomery Clift, as the psychiatrist more and more drawn to his patient, while Powers is now engaged to a second Englishman, this one much more manly. The freaks of the mental hospital who menace Taylor throughout the middle scenes of SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER have their own equivalents in the servants staffing Tallulah Bankhead's giant Tudor mansion in the Cornish countryside, including Dinald Sutherland as a true Igor type.
Stefanie Powers has one fantastic outfit after another, except that Tallulah Bankhead objects to jewelry, mirrors, even salt and pepper in her evangelical madness, so little by little Stefanie (as Pat Carroll) is required to look more and more prim and proper, though the inmates bash her around so much all her clothes are ripped and sleazy. Eventually some secrets of Bankhead's past emerge, and apparently she used to be an actress of some sort, for she owns about 50,000 glossy headshots of Tallulah Bankhead in her glamorous 1920s and 1930s days when Bankhead was queen of the West End and a Paramount contract star. I never figured that one out but one look at Bankhead's secret atelier of glamor, her den of self-worship, would have presumably turned her little son Stephen gay back in his vanished childhood, and so maybe she is acting out of guilt, the way that, in SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER, at a certain point Katharine Hepburn realizes that the whole Mexican mess where the young boys eat Sebastian might have had something to do with her own faults as a mother. I don't know, it's sort of blame the victim time! In any case, everyone, even Donald Sutherland as Igor, out-acts our heroine Stefanie Powers, and yet we root for her escape with great fervor.
Summary of Die Die My Darling
An elderly religious fanatic whose son was killed in an auto wreck several years ago kidnaps her dead son's former fiancée and keeps her locked up in the basement in order to cleanse the girl's soul, making it fit to be reunited with her son in heaven. Stars Stefanie Powers (TV?s "Hart to Hart") and screen legend Tallulah Bankhead in her last film.Similar DVD Movies
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