Robert A. here (of Distant Relatives). When Nathaniel asked us to pick a Tennessee Williams based film and write about it, my first instinct was the pick something I’d seen again and again and thus could write with authority. Unfortunately all of those films were quickly scooped up and I thought, why not take the opportunity to explore one I’d always wanted to see but hadn’t gotten around to. Why did I want to see Suddenly, Last Summer?
Well...
Of course, Tennessee Williams films are often saturated in dripping sexuality.
Cue the crotchety old man in me saying “In my day, when films couldn’t show two people hopping in the sack, they were sexier.” But in the case of Williams, it’s true. Consider shirtless desperate Marlon Brando shouting out for his lover in Streetcar or Eli Wallach seducing Carrol Baker in Baby Doll. This wasn’t every day sexuality winkingly eluded to to get past the censors. This was dangerous stuff.
Which finally brings me to Suddenly, Last Summer which stars Montgomery Clift as a psychiatrist hired by Katharine Hepburn to analyze, diagnose (and lobotomize) Elizabeth Taylor who has been hopelessly manic since witnessing the sudden death of her cousin Sebastian (Hepburn’s loving son) "last summer".
death haunts those conversations about last summer.
Made just a year after Cat on a Hot Tin Roof had every suggestion of Brick’s homosexuality purged, and knowing writer Gore Vidal claimed the studios made him do much of the same I went in expecting no less. Perhaps the innocence of the 50’s was still in full swing but from Taylor’s blunt declaration that Sebastian used she and his mother as “decoys” to attract desperate men, to the production design which covered Sebastian’s study with pictures and sculptures of naked men, the “undertones” seemed more like overtones.
To be gay would be shocking enough for audiences in 1959. But Sebastian’s predatory nature and the details of his grizzly murder add up to a kind of vampire sexuality where characters are at the complete whims of their urges, easily seduced, uncontrollably impassioned, set in a world explicitly characterized as one where the chaos of nature has free reign and we’re all victims in the making waiting to be devoured. My introduction to Suddenly, Last Summer was also my initiation into the most shocking of Tennessee Williams.
not the kind of action Sebastian was looking for
Suddenly Last Summer is actually a one-act play and, as such was not a Broadway outing for Tennessee in it's original run, double billed with another one-act. The film version won 3 Oscar nominations (art direction and a double Best Actress for Taylor and Hepburn. They lost to Simone Signoret in Room at the Top) There are no other feature film versions though there was a televised BBC production in the 90s with Maggie Smith (Emmy nominated), Rob Lowe, Richard E Grant and Natasha Richardson.
Great classic films, best all time movies
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