Suddenly, Last Summer
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Movie Reviews of Suddenly, Last Summer
Movie Review: wonderful movie, excellent condition,
Summary: 5 Stars
Love the movie! It was here quickly and it had no problems, skips or any defects.Movie Review: Suddenly, it hits you like a ton of bricks...
Summary: 4 Stars
I've recently become a huge fan of Elizabeth Taylor. It all happened while I was investing my time into Paul Newman's filmography. Once I saw her steal scene after scene in `Cat on a Hot Tin Roof' I knew that I had to know this woman more intimately. So next I watched her 1963 epic `Cleopatra' (review to come, I promise) and I knew that this woman was special. So I jumped at this one, since it was adapted from a Tennessee Williams play (and I had just rewatched `A Streetcar Named Desire', and had adored the aforementioned `Cat on a Hot Tin Roof', so you do the math).
`Suddenly Last Summer' is a very unique, very disturbing look at the lengths we will go to in order to protect the ones we love. Shame and rage calculate into this deeply revolutionary tale of a woman desperate to protect her sons honor following his mysterious death.
The film opens with famed Dr. Cukowicz being summoned to the home of Mrs. Violet Venable; an older distinguished woman who is prepared to ask a very odd request of the young doctor. Violet has recently lost her son Sebastian and the only witness to his death was his cousin Catherine. What she witnessed was so extreme and frightening that she has gone insane. Violet wishes to have this girl lobotomized, supposedly to end her pain but it is apparent that Violet's reasons are much more complicated than that. The Dr. is hesitant, especially after he meets Catherine and realizes that there is more to this story than meets the eye.
The film really boils down to its shocking and tragic finale, which is delivered with violent fervor by Elizabeth Taylor as she recounts the truth behind Sebastian's death. Without this vital piece of information the film may have fallen apart, and what's so nice about this conclusion and the way that it is handled is that it is ambiguous enough to almost remain a mystery. Due to censorship back in the early years of cinema certain subjects were untouchable to-to-speak and so the real reasons behind Sebastian's death are somewhat guarded; but the way that Vidal adapted Williams' play and the way that Mankiewicz directs the flashbacks helps paint the true story for those willing to read between the lines. It's expertly done; thinly veiled and completely effective.
In a word; shocking.
Both Elizabeth Taylor and Katherine Hepburn received Oscar nominations for their performances here, and both of them are very effective. When portraying a character that was written for the stage on the screen an actor can fall easily into overacting, but at times that overacting becomes almost neccisary in order to really portray that character correctly. Elizabeth Taylor is always endearing and intriguing, and her ending monologue is ferocious to say the least, but I must say that I found myself constantly drawn to Katherine Hepburn, and that is not something I expected. I've always found this particular Hepburn to be vastly overrated, but here she is beyond stunning. She has the villionas role of the overprotective mother down to a T and she crisply and sublimely allows herself to filter through the very real and very sharp emotions of this woman. Even during Taylor's staggering recounting of the tragedy that befell Sebastian I found myself glued to Hepburn's every facial glitch.
She was mesmerizing.
I must say that I was a little put-off by the supporting cast, and even by Montgomery Clift. He just seemed very out of it throughout the film. Mercedes McCambridge and Gary Raymond came off like clichéd caricatures, but it's not enough to really gripe about. Had Clift at the very least performed a richer performance than this could have been a brilliant, A+ film. Instead it gets knocked down a peg, resting at an easy B+. The real heat here comes from the blisteringly realized script and the dueling of two very accomplished and very courageous actresses who buried deep into these roles ands into themselves to deliver something that will render us speechless.
Movie Review: ABSORBING AND SURREAL PSYCHODRAMA FOR MATURE AUDIENCES
Summary: 4 Stars
The subject matter of this film, adapted from an intense one-act play by Tennessee Williams, will certainly not appeal to everybody. But mature viewers should be absorbed and fascinated by this Gothic psychodrama. In order to understand the plot, it helps to know a few sad, key elements from Williams' past. Williams' parents did not know what to do with his beloved sister Rose. In 1942, with Williams away, Rose was given a lobotomy. Williams never forgave his parents, or himself, for this. With "Summer", Williams seems to be getting some measure of twisted revenge, while wrestling with some of his own inner demons as well.
Katharine Hepburn plays brillantly against type as the vengeful Violet Venable. Violet's son Sebastian died suddenly last summer while on a European holiday with her niece Catherine Holly (Elizabeth Taylor). Violet wants Dr. Cukrowitz (Montgomery Clift) to give Catherine a lobotomy so she will stop her "obscene babbling" regarding the real truth of Sebastian's death. There is some marvelous forshadowing by Williams during a pivitol monologue near the beginning of the film, delivered by Violet in Sebastian's spooky, primeval garden of devouring plants.
To add to Catherine's troubles, her annoying mother and greedy brother (Mercades McCambridge and Gary Raymond) seems all too anxious to have Catherine comitted to Lion's View Asylum to have the devastating operation. Fortunately, the good Doctor is not about to do anything until he solves the puzzle of what really happened suddenly last summer.
Hepburn and Taylor give two outstanding, tour-de-force performances. Both were nominated for the Academy Award as Best Actress. Being nominated in the same category, they both, in effect, cancelled each other out; according to the strange rules and ways of the Academy Awards. Caught in the middle of the dramatic fireworks, Montgomery Clift is often unfairly criticised for giving a placid performance in comparsion to Hepburn and Taylor. Clift's role is largely reactionary, and he smartly underplays it. Smart, because someone has to (literally) be the voice of calm and reason here.
Williams' plays always baffled and battled with the film censors. The brilliant cast of Viven Leigh, Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, and Karl Malden fought hard to maintain the integrity of "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1951) on screen. Although toned-down, "Streetcar" still makes a magnificent movie. By contrast, "Cat On A Hot Tin Roof" is so whitewashed (the central homosexuality is missing), the 1958 movie is ridiculous nonsense. By late 1959, perhaps the times were changing. Or maybe everybody involved with "Summer", especially director Joseph L. Mankiewicz ("All About Eve") and writer Gore Vidal just didn't give a damn and ripped the envelope wide open. Vidal does a masterful job of adapting Williams' play, opening it up just enough for movies without diluting or destroying its disturbing content. Thus, "Summer" arrived on screen with its shock value intact. The final twenty minutes belong to Elizabeth Taylor, who delivers an explosive monologue in which the truth is finally revealed. The truth will have different meanings, depending on your own, individual moral code and value system. Catherine's revelations save her life and send Violet over the edge into a final grand delusion. Perhaps "Summer" is lurid and overheated, after all. But Tennessee Williams makes even the most lurid subject matter strangely surreal and beautifully poetic.
Movie Review: The Sweet Bird Of Youth Gone Awry
Summary: 4 Stars
The first couple of paragraphs here have been used as introduction to other plays written by Tennessee Williams and reviewed in this space. This review applies to both the stage play and the film versions with differences noted as part of the review
Perhaps, as is the case with this reviewer, if you have come to the works of the excellent American playwright Tennessee Williams through adaptations of his plays to commercially distributed film you too will have missed some of the more controversial and intriguing aspects of his plays that had placed him at that time along with Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller as America's finest serious playwrights. Although some of the films have their own charms I want to address the written plays in this entry first (along with, when appropriate, commentary about Williams' extensive and detailed directing instructions).
That said, there are certain limitations for a political commentator like this reviewer on the works of Williams. Although his plays, at least his best and most well-known ones, take place in the steamy South or its environs, there is virtually no acknowledgement of the race question that dominated Southern life during the period of the plays; and, for that matter was beginning to dominate national life. Thus, although it is possible to pay homage to his work on its artistic merits, I am very, very tentative about giving fulsome praise to that work on its political merits. With that proviso Williams nevertheless has created a very modern stage on which to address social questions at the personal level like homosexuality, incest and the dysfunctional family that only began to get addressed widely well after his ground-breaking work hit the stage.
"Suddenly Last Summer is an odd little beauty of a play. Odd in that the appetites of the main (unseen in the play) character Sebastian seem to be both beyond the pale and obsessive. Odd, also that his protective monster of a mother is determined to keep the truth about her "genius" son from the world even after his `untimely' death ......last summer. As if to add fuel to the fire of an already bizarre tale of exploitation, sexual and otherwise, Sebastian's beautiful lure of a cousin used as bait for Sebastian's appetites is to be permanently taken out of the picture in order to keep this world 'beautiful'. Nobody wants to believes the sordid tale she has to tell about dear cousin Sebastian. The play ends with the `hope' that there may actually be someone to believe the girl's story before she becomes one more sacrifice to `beauty' in the world.
In the movie version, the stories that have to be told verbally in the play get told as flashbacks as well. Katherine Hepburn is in high dudgeon as Sebastian's mother and `keeper of the flame'. Montgomery Clift is a more sober, somber and searcher for the truth psychiatrist than the one in the play and Elizabeth Taylor is the beautiful lure cousin is a mass of confusions whose memories of last summer have to be erased ....some way. Old Sebastian and his twisted sense of life and his place in history is still a guy who had it coming to him. Well, he did, didn't he?
Movie Review: Flamboyant Southern Gothic Tennessee Williams Served Up by Masters
Summary: 4 Stars
It's hard to take your eyes off an impossibly beautiful, 27-year old Elizabeth Taylor, especially in her skintight white bathing suit, and the fact that she gives a powerhouse performance, likely her best prior to "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", is reason enough to watch this 1959 Gothic melodrama from the fulsome pen of Tennessee Williams. She plays Catherine Holly, a mentally unstable young woman traumatized by a violent incident which ended with her cousin Sebastian's death last summer in a Mexican beach resort.
Trapped in a mental hospital that recalls the bowels of the asylum presented in "The Snake Pit" ten years earlier, she cannot remember what happened and is constantly drugged but manages to exhibit enough credibility to make Dr. Cukrowicz assess that she may not be disturbed enough to warrant a lobotomy. The procedure is being pushed by the late Sebastian's grande dame mother, Violet Venable, who wants to silence Catherine lest she reveal the shocking secrets of Sebastian's life and death. A doyenne of New Orleans society, Mrs. Venable dangles a tempting carrot of a $1 million donation to Cukrowicz's hospital for brain research if the lobotomy is done.
As was common under the production code in the 1950's and similar to what was done to dilute Williams' "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof", the film only alludes to Sebastian's homosexuality, using rather graphic symbolism to bring across the dramatic tension of the situation. In this case, it works because it's consistent with the Baroque style of the entire movie. Taylor goes toe-to-toe with the formidable Katharine Hepburn playing against type as Mrs. Venable, a cold and manipulative character whose flamboyant hypocrisy hides her own unsteady state. Each actress gets a showy monologue with Catherine's climactic description of that infamous summer the true capper of the story.
Saddled with the purely observational role of Cukrowicz, Montgomery Clift seems rather passive as he has to explain the more convoluted plot points in a becalmed manner. Co-adapted for the screen by Gore Vidal and Williams, the film is dialogue-heavy as most of Williams' works are, and director Joseph Mankiewicz ("All About Eve", "A Letter to Three Wives") is a master at this type of character interplay. Jack Hildyard's crisp black-and-white cinematography works well for this story as color would have emphasized the melodramatic excesses (note how pale Taylor's violent eyes look). The only notable extras on the 2000 DVD are some vintage photo stills. Unfortunately, this film was not included as part of the recently released, six-film Tennessee Williams Film Collection.