Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)

Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Starring Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, Katharine Hepburn, Mercedes McCambridge, Albert Dekker, Mavis Villiers, Gary Raymond, Patricia Marmont.

Tennessee Williams’ one-act play becomes a tiresome and pretentious feature film, wallowing in the bizarre and depraved, but despite the efforts of director Mankiewicz and photographer Jack Hildyard to make the stagy material a little more cinematic, the picture is so stagnant and talky (even by the playwright’s standards) that pleasures are almost impossible to find even on the level of the lurid. Rich old battleaxe Hepburn promises funding for a struggling state hospital if their hotshot surgeon (Clift) treats—and lobotomizes—her troubled niece (Taylor), who perhaps knows secrets about her cousin that Hepburn doesn’t want to get out. Charged with Freudian hysterics, pop psychological allusions, and absurd shock tactics (especially in regard to what became of that poor young man), but to no reasonable purpose or analogy, rendering it all as a pointless conceit. Hepburn does fine work, but Clift is shaky and uncertain, and Taylor’s descent into endless histrionics for the climax is utterly exhausting (at least she can be seen wearing a clingy white swimsuit in a flashback, and she wears it well). Screenplay adaptation by Gore Vidal.

41/100