Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)

(On Cable TV, June 2021) It strikes me that a good way to distinguish between new classic movie fans and veteran ones is to ask them about Suddenly, Last Summer: Novice film fans, not having seen the film, are likely to be astounded by the top talent assembled here: Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Cliff and Katharine Hepburn on the acting front, with Joseph L. Mankiewicz at the direction and none other than Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams penning the script, how can it be anything than terrific? Then there are the veteran classic movie fans who, having seen the film, are simply shaking their heads while saying, “You should see it before getting excited.” The most important name here is probably Tennessee Williams, since his specific sensibilities dominate the film’s narrative in such a way as to influence everything else. True to form for Williams, the story he’s telling is a melodrama with a central (but faceless) character who’s as homosexual as could be at the time. If I understand the film’s production history, the Williams one-act play was then adapted for the screen by Gore Vidal, leading both to accuse the other of sabotaging the result. No matter who wrote it, director Mankiewicz went for maximal melodrama in executing it, with Hepburn being an enthusiastic participant in the result — her role as a family matriarch is heightened opera the moment she descends on-screen in an enclosed throne, and the flowery soliloquies she delivers would have been ridiculous from any other actress. Cliff does his best to keep up as the audience’s representative in understanding the profoundly dysfunctional family in which he’s been asked to intervene, but he routinely gets overshadowed by Hepburn’s arch overacting and Taylor’s ability to take her dialogue right up to eleven even with a heaving low-cut dress. The score is another intrusive participant, underlining every sordid revelation with a heavy note. It’s quite wild, and the narrative never stops one-upping itself, eventually reaching for a cannibalistic conclusion reinforcing the era’s prejudice against homosexuals. What’s more, I’m glossing over the rape, incest, and intended lobotomy as a way to keep the family secret — as I’ve said, it’s a wild movie, and one that’s more impressive for how quickly it becomes untethered from reality than for producing the results that the cast and crew would have preferred. By sheer happenstance, I followed up Suddenly Last Summer by the viewing of homosexuality-in-Hollywood-history documentary The Celluloid Closet, and I’m fortunate that this was the order I watched both films because The Celluloid Closet’s description of Suddenly Last Summer’s ludicrousness would have been too wild to believe if I hadn’t just watched the film. There are plenty of landmark movies in classic Hollywood history, and if Suddenly Last Summer is really not one of them, I still feel as if I just graduated to another stage of understanding Hollywood history simply by having watched it. Incredulously.