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| SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER (1959) |
A Horizon (G.B.) Limited Production in association with Academy Pictures and Camp Films
A Columbia Pictures Release
B&W, 114 minutes
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CAST
Catherine Holly: Elizabeth Taylor
Mrs. Venable: Katharine Hepburn
Dr. Cukrowicz: Montgomery Clift
Dr. Hockstader: Albert Dekker
Mrs. Holly: Mercedes McCambridge
George Holly: Gary Raymond
Miss Foxhill: Mavis Villiers
Nurse Benson: Patricia Marmont
Sister Felicity: Joan Young
Lucy: Maria Britneva
Dr. Hockstader's Secretary: Sheila Robbins
Young Blond Interne: David Cameron
A Patient: Roberta Woolley
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CREDITS
Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Producer: Sam Spiegel
Scenarists: Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams
Based on the Short Play by: Tennessee Williams
Photographer: Jack Hildyard
Production Supervisor: Bill Kirby
Production Designer: Oliver Messel
Art Director: William Kellner
Set Decorator: Scott Slimon
Editorial Consultant: William W. Hornbeck
Editor: Thomas G. Stanford
Sound Recorders: A.G. Ambler, John Cox
Sound Editor: Peter Thornton
Musical Score: Buxton Orr, Malcolm Arnold
Assembly Editor: John Jympson
Costumer for Miss Taylor: Jean Louis
Costumer for Miss Hepburn: Norman Hartnell
Associate Costumer: Joan Ellacott
Makeup Artist: David Aylott
Hair Stylist: Joan White
Special Photographic Effects: Tom Howard
Assistant Director: Bluey Hill
Camera Operator: Gerry Fisher
Construction Manager: Dewey Dukelow
Continuity: Elaine Schreyeck
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SYNOPSIS
In North Africa, Sebastian Venable, a rich and cosseted American poet, dies suddenly during the summer. The death certificate declares it a heart attack, but mentions that the body "was somewhat damaged." Catherine Holly, the poet's beauteous cousin, who was with him at the time, babbles about "dreadful things," but she is incoherent and unclear. Her aunt, Mrs. Violet Venable - determined to protect her son's reputation at any cost - has her committed to an insane asylum and demands that she be given a lobotomy, which may turn her into an imbecile, but will end her ravings about Sebastian's life - and death.
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CRITIQUES
"Katharine Hepburn, as Sebastian's mother, acts brilliantly but privately, as though she'd never realized there were other persons in the picture....I loathe this film. I say so candidly. To my mind it is a decadent piece of work, sensational, barbarous, and ridiculous."
- C.A. Lejeune, The (London) Observer, 1959
"Katharine Hepburn's role is one that even in its evil has a perverted charm. As to (her) performance, it is splendid, as one might expect. Words in this film are dominant, not merely one tool but the adze with which the mood, the action, and the characterization are shaped. One can relish the exquisite way in which Miss Hepburn reads them, but one cannot forget that it is the word, not her actions, that makes the film."
- Paul V. Beckley, New York Herald Tribune, 1959
"One of Tennessee Williams' feverous fantasies, padded out by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, the director, and by Williams and Gore Vidal, who did the screenplay. They should never have allowed the audience so much time to think about what's going on: the short play turns into a ludicrous, lumbering horror movie. Katharine Hepburn is rather amusing as the Southern-belle dragon lady whose homosexual poet-son, Sebastian, was killed and partly eaten by the North African boys he'd preyed upon. Elizabeth Taylor is her distraught niece, whom she's trying to get lobotomized so that the girl won't be able to tell the story. Taylor works hard at her big monologue, trying to give us the shudders, but Mankiewicz has delayed her revelations too long. Montgomery Clift, in possibly his worst performance, is the dimwitted neurosurgeon who can't seem to get anything into his eminent head."
- Pauline Kael, The New Yorker
"Joseph L. Mankiewicz flirts with camp in his 1959 adaptation of Tennessee Williams's sweaty gothic study, with Katharine Hepburn as a production-line southern dowager brooding over the blossoming relationship between her brain-damaged daughter (Elizabeth Taylor) and her doctor (Montgomery Clift). The cast packs enough sexual ambiguity to satisfy the most rabid Williams fan (not to mention a screenplay by Gore Vidal), but Mankiewicz leaves much of the innuendo unexplored - thankfully, perhaps."
- Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
"From a Tennessee Williams play, an outrageous, melodramatic shocker touching on madness, homosexual prostitution, incest, disease and cannibalism, replete with enough imagery to sustain an American Lit seminar for months. On film, with Taylor as the woman who saw something nasty and Clift as the psychiatrist trying to probe her trauma, the one-act material is stretched perilously thin; but it works for Hepburn as the incarnation of civilized depravity, the matriarch trying to keep the lid on things by persuading Clift to lobotomize her niece (Taylor, whose performance suggests that surgery has already taken place)."
- Jennifer Selway, Time Out
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COMMENTARY TRACK
"She felt I was being brutal to Montgomery Clift, but we had a real problem making the picture work, he was always late - it was horrible. Finally, on the last day of shooting, Kate came up to me, looked me hard in the eye, and spat. On the floor. Then she went into Sam Spiegel's office and spat on his floor. She never worked with either of us again."
- Joseph L. Mankiewicz
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HOME VIDEO AVAILABILITY
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Katharine Hepburn
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Katharine Hepburn
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Katharine Hepburn, Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor
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Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor
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Katharine Hepburn
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Katharine Hepburn
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Katharine Hepburn
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Montgomery Clift, Katharine Hepburn
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Mock brawl on the set
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On the set: Montgomery Clift, Katharine Hepburn, Joseph Mankiewicz
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On the set: Katharine Hepburn
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