Suddenly Last Summer is
cinema’s gay horn of plenty, a fabulous gothic thriller and a pantheon
of renowned gay artists and gay icons and it’s disappointing – though
sadly not surprising - that modern gay culture has all but ignored it.
The film is directed by four-time Oscar winner Joseph L. Mankiewicz,
who made All About Eve.
America’s two premier twentieth-century gay writers, Gore Vidal and
Tennessee Williams, collaborate to form a once-only screenwriting dream
team, adapting Williams’ one-act play. To repeat, the screenplay is
written by Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams.
Montgomery Clift, after his car accident and well into serious decline,
stars as a neurosurgeon who specialises in lobotomies for hysterical
schizophrenics.
Elizabeth Taylor plays his patient.
And Katharine Hepburn plays her aunt.
Beyond this flabbergasting roll call lies a sinister story of sodomy,
secrecy and insanity, where exotic plants, Mexican youths and
protective mothers all devour flesh, in one way or another …
Dr. Cukrowicz (Clift) desperately needs money to fund the neurosurgery
department of his crumbling local hospital. Enter Violet Venable
(Hepburn), a zillionairesss widow who wants her institutionalized niece
Catherine (Taylor) lobotomized before she can say too much about
Violet’s beloved dandy son, Sebastian, who was on summer holiday with
Catherine at the time of his sensational, suspicious death. Violet is
happy to hand over a blank cheque to Dr Cukrowicz’s hospital, as long
as he severs Catherine’s prefrontal cortex, and pronto before anoyone
learns of Sebastian's creepy sexuality.
Apparently, Catherine was the last to see Sebastian alive, and the
outrageous circumstances of his death have rendered her amnesiac and
hysterical. She’s been placed in an asylum administered by nuns, who
keep a safe distance from their new inmate, the crackerjack siren who
smokes, swears, and only needs to get a hold of a hair brush and a bra
to unleash the genie.
Dr Cukrowicz meets with Catherine, and finds a young woman who’s
perfectly sane, just stunned into silence by what we these days would
probably call post-traumatic stress disorder. Catherine flirts a bit
with Dr Cukrowicz, and tries to convince him that regaining her
“serenity” doesn’t mean he has to saw open her skull and wave a scalpel
around inside her brain.
Can she do this in time, before unhinged Violet’s financial juggernaut
rolls over all and sundry? Will the Dr Cukrowicz’s experimental new
truth-serum unlock the secrets of Sebastian’s death, clearing poor
Catherine of any insanity? Will we get to see just what went on that
summer, and decide for ourselves if Sebastian was merely just another
of Vito Russo’s suicidal/murder victim movie homos?
Catherine and Violet bookend Dr Cukrowicz and tear at him with their
considerable powers. Violet has charisma and money to burn, while
Catherine has her passion, beauty, tits and ass. In a memorable
confrontation, Catherine reminds Violet that she’s too old to
“attract”, a skill highly regarded by Sebastian, who apparently loved
to have a beautiful woman nearby to lure sexy guys for his own use.
Sadly (though it does suit the mysterious anonymity the film frames him
in) we don’t ever get to see Sebastian, beyond a few shots of his legs
and his blurry moving form in long shot. He gets my vote as “gay film
character of the century” for his shameless carnality, high-voltage
charisma, and for being a son of Tennessee Williams.
Suddenly, Last Summer unrolls creakily like a one-act play –
there are only half a dozen major scenes in the film, some running for
well over fifteen minutes, and featuring great actors in spectacular
Williams duologues. Bizarre highlights include Violet descending in a
one-storey one-person elevator, Catherine (dressed to the nines)
stumbling across an asylum catwalk grabbed at by horny male inmates,
and a surreal Mediterranean cannibalism scene that’s straight out of
Pasolini.
Oh, and IV-ecstasy/crystal meth users note: the scene where Catherine
gets shot up with “truth serum” then gets real chatty, before tongue
kissing everyone in sight is a thing for you to treasure.
