Suddenly Last Summer: Does It Resonate?

 

 

 

Suddenly Last Summer (1959)

Directed by Joseph Mankiewicz

Columbia Pictures, 114 minutes, Not-rated.

★★★

 

More than a dozen Tennessee Williams plays have been made into movies, including Suddenly Last Summer in 1959. It had the advantages of being directed by the talented Joseph Mankiewicz, a screenplay penned by Gore Vidal, and the incomparable Katherine Hepburn in its cast. She was more than up to task of a Williams drama but by then, her star was eclipsing and that of Elizabeth Taylor was ascendant. She would win a Golden Globe for Suddenly Last Summer, not Hepburn.

 

The film also stars Mercedes McCambridge and Montgomery Clift, which made it well-acted and well-crafted all around. The open question is how well it holds up and on that score the answer is decidedly mixed. It largely depends on how you feel about the now-outmoded psychiatric precepts upon which it rests.

 

It is something of a pas de deux between Vi(olet) Venable (Hepburn) and her niece Cathy Holly (Taylor). Cathy is a troubled but reluctant patient in a private Catholic hospital. She suffers from trauma resulting from the death of her cousin Sebastian while they were traveling together. Call it a European vacation gone horribly wrong. Cathy adored Sebastian, but her aunt Vi blames her for failing to protect her son Sebastian. From what? Ahh, there’s the rub.

 

Cathy exhibits severe behavioral issues. She is cynical, babbles, and is prone to angry outbursts. Her mother Grace (McCambridge) insists that Cathy is just a sensitive poet type, but for 1937 New Orleans–the post-vacation setting for Williams’ play–that’s partially code for meaning she’s unorthodox, obscene, seductive, and oversexed. But does this make her dangerous? Vi thinks so and encourages Dr. John Cukrowicz (Clift) to lobotomize Cathy for her own good. He can tell that she has sublimized a deep shock, but insists that Cathy first be treated by talk therapy. The wild card is that Vi promises hospital director Dr. Lawrence Hockstader (Albert Dekker) she will fund a new wing, but only if Dr. Cukrowicz removes the “hideous story” from Cathy’s brain.

 

Hideous story? Holy Sigmund Freud, Batman! Without revealing too much, sex plays a role in the “hideous story,” but are we still talking about Cathy? Vi insists her son “saw the face of God” before he died and the more Dr. Cukrowicz talks with Vi, the more we wonder whose sanity is most in question. So too does Cukrowicz, who thinks that buried pain has made both women reality-challenged. Two stories will surface and, in my opinion, reviewers missed the possibility that they might be the same story remembered in radically different ways.

 

Suddenly Last Summer was billed as a mystery thriller by some, and Gothic noir by others. My vote goes to the latter. In a particularly creepy moment bathed in shadows, d desperation, then resignation, Cathy is certain that a lobotomy is imminent. Imagine her caged anguish. Tennessee Williams often placed characters in trapped mental spaces. Some observers claim these paralleled Williams’ conflicted Catholic worldview and his mystical and moral qualms. This won’t make any sense unless you watch the film, but there’s a side story involving cannibalism could be symbolic and imaginary, not literal. And, yes, there is indeed quite a lot that’s cloaked in Freudian garb, raiment that often unsettles contemporary views of sexuality.

 

It's almost guaranteed that certain ethnic aspects of Suddenly Last Summer will seem past their sell-by date. Sebastian’s fate takes place on the fictional island of  Cabeza de Lobo. It looks like a Caribbean location, but it was filmed in the Balearic islands of Spain. They do not come off well. Ethnocentrism? Exoticism? Projected primitivism? A commentary on repressed colonialism?

 

Strangely, the film was criticized in its day for stretching Williams’ one-act play with needless filler to bring it to movie length. Today it feels like there’s too much going on! Alas, it ends rather meekly and abruptly, as if there was no convincing way to complete it. Yet, Hepburn and Taylor? Is that worth a peek? Of course.

 

Rob Weir