Suddenly, Last Summer

I thought Evelyn Waugh’s Sebastian from 'Brideshead Revisited' was annoying until I encountered Tennessee Williams’ Sebastian in this over-wrought melodrama (I can’t recall being so irritated by Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane, 1976). In Mankiewicz’s hands Williams’s 1957 one-act play (Gore Vidal wrote the screenplay) is part ham-fisted B grade potboiler, part florid Gothic horror histrionics.

The film is set in 1937 in New Orleans. Montgomery Clift  plays Dr. John Cukrowicz, a hot-shot “psycho-surgeon” with a specialty in lobotomy who gets as a patient, Catherine Holly (Elizabeth Taylor).  Her overbearing mother Mrs. Violet Venables (Katharine Hepburn) wants her lobotomized but Dr. Cukrowicz suspects that she is trying to cover up something that Catherine knows about her deceased brother Sebastian, on whom her mother dotes. I won’t go any further than to say Pasolini would have liked this film.

I didn’t. With its turgid, almost incantatory dialogue and its sensationalist mix of cupidity, insanity, erotomania and homosexuality, it tries so hard for effect as to be almost caricatural.  Mankiewicz exacerbates the effect with his heavy-handed symbolism and contrived mise-en-scène (Williams did not like the treatment either). Taylor and Hepburn both serve adequately in their roles but the former isn’t remotely probable as a disturbed young woman and Hepburn does little more than serve up her stock-in-trade mannerisms (apparently she regretted taking the part, worrying that it was going to tarnish her image as a screen beauty).  Between the two, Clift, his face only recently reconstructed after a car accident, and suffering badly from a mixture of alcohol, drug abuse and depression looks like a frightened rabbit.

Suddenly, Last Summer is arrant nonsense dignified by an A-list cast that, was an unexpected commercial success and revived Mankiewicz's flagging career.

FYI: In the Renaissance the martyrdom of St Sebastian was a popular subject for painting for wealthy homosexual patrons as it gave them the opportunity to display images of naked boys. Once such painting appears in Sebastian's studio.

Williams's sister had been lobotomised with the approval of their over-bearing mother and he also incorporated the violence he encountered in his own homosexual pursuits into his play. 

 

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