It became the vogue in the 1960s for mature actresses to prolong their shaky careers by a movie or two by appearing in horror films. It is significant that, as the youth culture was taking over the medium and society in general, Hollywood opted to show former icons of the silver screens in roles that often cruelly revealed their ages as terrorized victims of violence or equally terrorizing purveyors of violence. Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Tallulah Bankhead, Olivia de Havilland, Geraldine Page, Ruth Gordon, Shelley Winters and even Debbie Reynolds gave it a shot and, surprisingly, some of their movies were really pretty good: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?; HUSH...HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE; WHATEVER HAPPENED TO AUNT ALICE? and ROSEMARY'S BABY.
The ever classy Katharine Hepburn is generally thought to have avoided such films, but in reality she was part of the vanguard in 1959 having contributed SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER to the genre. Oh, SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER does pretend to be anything but a horror movie and bears the pedigree of being a high-toned art film. In addition to Hepburn, the cast includes Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift; the script is by Gore Vidal from a play by Tennessee Williams; and it is all delivered under the direction of Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Such talent, plus the droningly pretentious dialogue concerning art and insanity, create the illusion of serious drama, but this is nonetheless a freak show horror movie that simply lacks the good grace to include any genuine suspense.
Traipsing around her Gothic manse with all the coy sinister villainy of a Vincent Price, Hepburn plays Violet Venable in a performance that is so deliciously awful that it flirts with being pure camp. She plans to commemorate her grown son's untimely death by having her niece lobotomized. It seems her niece, Catherine, played with breathless hysteria by Taylor, knows the wicked truth about the life and death of Violet's only child, Sebastian: he was a "poet," a code word for homosexual. Though, depending on how you decipher the film's confusing dialogue, he could also be a bisexual, a pedophile, a rapist and/or a victim of incest. Apparently, Sebastian used his mother as a "procurer" of young boys (how young is left vague) -- though just why a wealthy, handsome, educated, globe-trotting sophisticate like Sebastian would need his mommy to get him playmates is not at all clear -- unless mommy was a playmate too. When Violet got too old to attract worthy young twinks, Sebastian enlisted the aid of Catherine (which makes a tad more sense, given Taylor's well-known gift for cultivating friendships with various gay men, including costar Clift).
Anyway, as pointed out in the book and movie THE CELLULOID CLOSET, Sebastian is portrayed as a monster and in scenes that echo the climax of FRANKENSTEIN, he is either literally or metaphorically "cannibalized" by a band of street urchins he had unwisely attempted to victimize. But if Sebastian is The Creature, then it follows that Violet must be his Dr. Frankenstein, a madwoman with the compulsion to play God. The film's unspoken evil is often thought to be homosexuality, but in reality it is incest. Violet catered to Sebastian's homosexual desires as a way of being part of his sex life and she wants Catherine destroyed because she thinks of her as a rival for Sebastian's affections, even posthumously. It all goes beyond kinky and straight to just plain weird.
SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER could have been an intriguing dark comedy, but as it plays hide and seek around the central issues it raises, it becomes a confusing morass of suggested perversions and sordid behaviors, made all the more obscure by a film production code that refused to admit the existence of the very issues the film tries to exploit. Add this to the fact that both of the women in question could be totally bonkers -- they are, after all, creations of Tennessee Williams -- and what is fact and what is bombastic silliness is further confused.
To a great degree, SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER is a distorted funhouse mirror image of Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO. Hitchcock, however, had the good sense to first craft a nifty little thriller and to save the twisted Oedipus backstory for his shocking ending. SUMMER talks all the psychological matters to death, yet manages the amazing feat of never actually discussing anything with any clarity. With some effort, this sort of peek-a-boo game-playing with the dialogue could have been amusing, but the only humor here is unintentional, provided by the overwrought performances.
It is alleged that Williams wrote the original play on orders from his psychiatrist as a way of dealing with his own conflicted feelings over his homosexuality. Such psycho-sexual therapy is best left to dream diaries rather than stage plays, let alone big budget motion pictures, though amateur Freudians would no doubt have a field day analyzing (or chuckling over) all the film's simplistic symbolism. (Violet's concern over the care and feeding of her carnivorous Venus Flytrap would be touching were it not so, well, creepy.)
SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER is a really bad movie. It is a mystery that leaves most of its questions unanswered and supplies an explanation for its main puzzle that is, to say the least, ridiculous. The production is obviously hamstrung by the censorship of the era, but even if were made today with complete freedom, it would still be more befuddled than bold. Williams clearly had issues in that, assuming Sebastian was his alter ego, he made one of the screen's first clearly homosexual characters to be both a villain and a victim, both omnipresent and totally invisible, both predator and prey. As a pseudo horror film SUMMER has little of relevance to say; but as a look into Williams' psyche it might be quite frightening.
I wonder what Tennessee's psychiatrist had to say about it?
The ever classy Katharine Hepburn is generally thought to have avoided such films, but in reality she was part of the vanguard in 1959 having contributed SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER to the genre. Oh, SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER does pretend to be anything but a horror movie and bears the pedigree of being a high-toned art film. In addition to Hepburn, the cast includes Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift; the script is by Gore Vidal from a play by Tennessee Williams; and it is all delivered under the direction of Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Such talent, plus the droningly pretentious dialogue concerning art and insanity, create the illusion of serious drama, but this is nonetheless a freak show horror movie that simply lacks the good grace to include any genuine suspense.
Traipsing around her Gothic manse with all the coy sinister villainy of a Vincent Price, Hepburn plays Violet Venable in a performance that is so deliciously awful that it flirts with being pure camp. She plans to commemorate her grown son's untimely death by having her niece lobotomized. It seems her niece, Catherine, played with breathless hysteria by Taylor, knows the wicked truth about the life and death of Violet's only child, Sebastian: he was a "poet," a code word for homosexual. Though, depending on how you decipher the film's confusing dialogue, he could also be a bisexual, a pedophile, a rapist and/or a victim of incest. Apparently, Sebastian used his mother as a "procurer" of young boys (how young is left vague) -- though just why a wealthy, handsome, educated, globe-trotting sophisticate like Sebastian would need his mommy to get him playmates is not at all clear -- unless mommy was a playmate too. When Violet got too old to attract worthy young twinks, Sebastian enlisted the aid of Catherine (which makes a tad more sense, given Taylor's well-known gift for cultivating friendships with various gay men, including costar Clift).
Anyway, as pointed out in the book and movie THE CELLULOID CLOSET, Sebastian is portrayed as a monster and in scenes that echo the climax of FRANKENSTEIN, he is either literally or metaphorically "cannibalized" by a band of street urchins he had unwisely attempted to victimize. But if Sebastian is The Creature, then it follows that Violet must be his Dr. Frankenstein, a madwoman with the compulsion to play God. The film's unspoken evil is often thought to be homosexuality, but in reality it is incest. Violet catered to Sebastian's homosexual desires as a way of being part of his sex life and she wants Catherine destroyed because she thinks of her as a rival for Sebastian's affections, even posthumously. It all goes beyond kinky and straight to just plain weird.
SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER could have been an intriguing dark comedy, but as it plays hide and seek around the central issues it raises, it becomes a confusing morass of suggested perversions and sordid behaviors, made all the more obscure by a film production code that refused to admit the existence of the very issues the film tries to exploit. Add this to the fact that both of the women in question could be totally bonkers -- they are, after all, creations of Tennessee Williams -- and what is fact and what is bombastic silliness is further confused.
To a great degree, SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER is a distorted funhouse mirror image of Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO. Hitchcock, however, had the good sense to first craft a nifty little thriller and to save the twisted Oedipus backstory for his shocking ending. SUMMER talks all the psychological matters to death, yet manages the amazing feat of never actually discussing anything with any clarity. With some effort, this sort of peek-a-boo game-playing with the dialogue could have been amusing, but the only humor here is unintentional, provided by the overwrought performances.
It is alleged that Williams wrote the original play on orders from his psychiatrist as a way of dealing with his own conflicted feelings over his homosexuality. Such psycho-sexual therapy is best left to dream diaries rather than stage plays, let alone big budget motion pictures, though amateur Freudians would no doubt have a field day analyzing (or chuckling over) all the film's simplistic symbolism. (Violet's concern over the care and feeding of her carnivorous Venus Flytrap would be touching were it not so, well, creepy.)
SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER is a really bad movie. It is a mystery that leaves most of its questions unanswered and supplies an explanation for its main puzzle that is, to say the least, ridiculous. The production is obviously hamstrung by the censorship of the era, but even if were made today with complete freedom, it would still be more befuddled than bold. Williams clearly had issues in that, assuming Sebastian was his alter ego, he made one of the screen's first clearly homosexual characters to be both a villain and a victim, both omnipresent and totally invisible, both predator and prey. As a pseudo horror film SUMMER has little of relevance to say; but as a look into Williams' psyche it might be quite frightening.
I wonder what Tennessee's psychiatrist had to say about it?