Last night, watched SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER (1959), starring Katherine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, and Montgomery Clift, which Gore Vidal expanded off the one-act play by Tennessee Williams. First time for me, recorded off TCM.
Oh, boy.
With dialogue and performances occupying the precise intersection between poetry and overbearing pretension, the story’s about a wealthy southern matriarch (Hepburn), who asks a doctor (Clift) to investigate whether it would be a good idea to lobotomize her institutionalized niece (Taylor), one year after the horrific death of her son.
It’s one of the several Tennessee Williams plays bowdlerized for the movies where the screenplay by necessity spends so much time dancing around a key character’s homosexuality, a horrible condition central to the plot, that some audiences of the day must have wondered just what the hell everybody was spinning so many florid metaphors about. (This fate also befell THE CHILDREN’S HOUR by Lillian Hellman.) I am under no such restriction, and therefore happily report that the trauma everybody’s not talking about involves the man in question (a reputedly gifted poet who produced one poem a year, thus making him fortunate he was rich), being pursued, torn to pieces and cannibalized by an angry gang of youths in Spain, after (it is strongly implied) he spent much of the summer buggering some of them. This is of course not homosexuality but pederasty, and neither is any excuse to go around eating people in the street. Eating people is weird.
(Maybe this is Tennessee Williams’s zombie movie. It would explain a lot.)
Elizabeth Taylor’s character is the cousin he traveled with, whose purpose as his companion was to attract prospects into his circle. He was otherwise totally uninterested in her. I find it interesting that Taylor was cast more than once as the woman whose proximity to a dude with no interest in her functions as proof that, Jeezus, he must be gay or something (the other that comes to mind being CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF). I agree, it’s fairly compelling evidence. Presumably, if they made similar movies about lesbians back then, the neglected dude would be Cary Grant. That would be just as eloquent.
As presented, it is mostly an excuse for the two ladies to emote, while Clift mostly hovers asking them leading questions so they can. (He was struggling with drug addiction at the time, and it was reported in the TCM intro that both his leading ladies were very protective of him, which is nice.) Hepburn in particular has an epic monologue about birds attacking newly hatched sea turtles that is fraught with cosmic significance and which she recites staring into the mid-distance, aware that this is her big moment. It’s Hepburn, so it doesn’t suck, but Judi and I were highly aware of the symbolic weight — as even a Michael Bay audience would be — and so it felt odd to be sitting there and not taking notes. Turtles. Right.
The oddest and funniest moment comes when Clift visits Taylor in the asylum where she’s been confined, and she’s wearing no makeup, and so she apologizes for how she looks, saying that she’s not normally this ugly. Yeah, Elizabeth Taylor apologizes for looking like such a sack of shit. This is especially funny because she is Elizabeth Taylor and she of course that had genuine mutation, an actual superpower that might have gotten her into the X-Men, double lashes, which means that even rolling out of bed she looked like she was wearing expertly applied eyeliner. I’m sorry I look so ugly, I promise, I clean up well. Hard as it might be to believe, fella. Elizabeth Taylor, people. I mean.
I found it a slog, honestly, and I *like* CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, which dealt with some of the same themes but was a hell of a lot easier to take. But if you want to watch it, watch it for Hepburn and Taylor.
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