Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)
Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz

Film Review

The essential themes of Southern Gothic American literature - decay, despair and mental derangement - are powerfully represented in its cinematic counterpart of the 1950s and '60s, allowing writers and filmmakers to deliver a sour social critique of the most damning kind.  Adapted from a one-act stage play of the same title by Tennessee Williams, Suddenly, Last Summer is one of the most striking films in this distinctive brand, one that offers arguably the bleakest assessment of human frailty to be found in any Hollywood production of its time.  Williams' original work was billed as the most provocative play in the world and the screen version was clearly intended to be just as shocking.  It is the darkest and most daring film that the esteemed writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz ever put his name to, probing facets of human nature and social issues that would have been of great interest to a late 1950s cinema audience but which few filmmakers had the courage or financial clout to tackle.

In its seedy subject matter, darkly oppressive mood and outrageously horrific denouement, Suddenly, Last Summer is every bit as representative of the Southern Gothic aesthetic as the better known classics The Night of the Hunter (1955), The Fugitive Kind (1960), To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) - although it has somewhat less viewer appeal than these more conventionally made, more lyrically haunting works and suffers from being too close to the original stage play in both its content and its execution.  It is a relentlessly grim film; watching it, you have the uncanny sensation of being drawn deeper and deeper into a narrowing subterranean passage leading ever downwards towards a monstrously conceived heart of darkness.  Nothing prepares us for the horror that awaits us at our journey's end.

In its near-the-knuckle presentation of contemporary social attitudes to mental illness and homosexuality Suddenly, Last Summer often feels out-dated and a tad offensive, particularly the recurrent suggestion that these are aberrations of the worst kind, to be vanquished for the good of society.  On closer examination, however, it becomes apparent that there is far more to this film than initially meets the eye - it is in fact remarkably subversive for its era.  'Kill, cure or incarcerate' was very much the mindset of the period when it came to dealing with socially undesirable individuals, so it was a brave move for a mainstream film to dare to suggest that such simple minded thinking posed a far greater threat to the public good.  (It is worth noting that the story is set twenty years in the past, and so the attitudes it depicts would have been unrepresentative of the time the film was made - although probably not as much as you might think given the conservative nature of American society.)

The writer Gore Vidal did an excellent job of fleshing out Williams' original stage shocker (the play's author refused to have anything to do with the film, which he utterly loathed), extending scenes and giving more lines to some of the lesser characters, whilst retaining the minimalist, highly contained structure of the original piece.  Mankiewicz's meticulous mise-en-scène employs imaginative use of atmospheric lighting and subtly suggestive camera positions to prevent his film from ever appearing static and stagy, whilst allowing the focus to stay locked on the principal actors - primarily the female leads - as they lure us into the tangled murky labyrinths of their warped minds.  The familiar trappings of Southern Gothic melodrama - including some boldly expressionistic set design strongly imbued with a sense of decrepitude, confinement and repression - lend a sustained aura of neurotic menace, adding to the tension and mounting sense of dread as the intrigue gently unfolds before our eyes.

For the bulk of the film, Suddenly, Last Summer rigorously adopts the structure of a conventional stage play, with mostly lengthy two-handed scenes and some very protracted monologues.  It required a particularly exceptional principal cast if it was to avoid ending up a pretentious avant-garde flop and in this it was especially fortunate.  The film has many strengths - the directing, writing, photography and art design are all of an exceptional order - but surpassing all of these is the quality of the acting. The previous year, Elizabeth Taylor had turned in a career-defining performance opposite Paul Newman in an adaptation of another controversial Tennessee Williams play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958).  At the time, the actress was deeply affected by the tragic death of her third husband Mike Todd in an aeroplane accident but she found she was able to channel her grief for therapeutic advantage through her portrayal of Catherine in Mankiewicz's film, and in so doing she gave what is possibly the greatest performance of her career.  Taylor's remarkable turn as a young woman battling a trauma-induced mental straitjacket that threatens to destroy her is stark and visceral in its authenticity.  There is an intensely heartrending fragility to this full-on, frighteningly realistic depiction of mental anguish, but this comes with some viciously slicing shards of psychotic menace, a harrowing sense of what it is like to be caught in the mind-twisting grip of a demonic possession.

As Catherine's prime tormentor - the sedately wicked Mrs Venable - Katharine Hepburn is as well-cast as Taylor and is no less captivating in the scenes in which she unburdens her own troubled soul, revealing something of the darkness and monstrosity that lies within each one us.  With her genteel but thoroughly misguided attempts to whitewash her dead son's reputation, even resorting to bribery to have an innocent girl reduced to a harmless vegetable, Mrs Venable would seem to be emblematic of a society that prefers to bury rather than accommodate the less desirable aspects of life.  Her quaint philosophy is that of any God-fearing Christian.  That which conflicts with our view of a benign, well-ordered universe must be unnatural, an affront to the wishes of a divine creator, and therefore must be put right.  Mental unbalance and sexual deviancy are matters to be cured or suppressed (at the time, homosexuality was widely considered a perversion; in a previous age, the mentally ill were branded the servants of Satan) - such things have no place in a decent Christian society.  This isn't so much a path to Utopia as the twisted philosophy of a psychopath.

Sickening though the egregiously self-righteous widow's views are, Hepburn still compels us to sympathise with her primly respectable, albeit patently insane, character when it emerges that she too is in a state of profound trauma following the sudden death of her son - a tragedy for which she feels entirely responsible as she was unable to accompany him on his last disastrous tour of Spain.  Mrs Venable is as emotionally scarred, as psychologically crippled as Catherine, and it is fascinating to compare the two unfortunate women as they fumble in the dark with their inner demons, one driven ever deeper into the abyss whilst the other scrambles heroically towards daylight.  It is Hepburn's psycho-biddy character that we end up pitying the most as she loses all connection with reality and takes Catherine's place as the solitary prisoner of a broken mind.

Cast in the role of what is effectively a facilitator or catalyst for the two female leads, allowing each to turn in a performance of mesmerising power, Montgomery Clift has much less of an impact but he serves the film well with his suitably mild and understated contribution.  It was only a few years before this that a car accident had cruelly robbed Clift of his devastating good looks and confidence; still heavily reliant on drugs and alcohol he had a hard time coping with even this fairly unchallenging role.  His inability to remember his lines slowed down the production and led Mankiewicz to make several requests to producer Sam Spegel to have him replaced.  Supported by his staunch allies Taylor (his co-star on the classic A Place in the Sun) and Hepburn, Clift persevered and the film is all the better for the hesitant, self-effacing manner in which he plays the conflicted Dr Cukrowicz as he tries to uncover the truth of Catherine's mental collapse.  Cukrowicz's professional struggles with his far less scrupulous superior Dr Hockstader (a subtly villainous Albert Dekker) serve to further ratchet up the tension whilst effectively airing a cogent polemic on the moral basis of certain clinical treatments for mental patients.

Watching it today, Suddenly, Last Summer appears ahead of its time in its astute handing of mental illness - if we forgive the glib over-reliance on Freudian analysis to bring about the happy ending.  It is however shockingly backward in its unwavering representation of homosexuality as both a sickness and a dangerously corrupting perversion.  As in Williams' earlier A Streetcar Named Desire, an important gay character is alluded to but he is never given a chance to offer his point of view. Sebastian Venable, we are told, is a sickly solitary poet who has a penchant for weirdly exotic plants and pretty boys procured for him by his doting mama.  He is a faceless shadow of a man, always seen from a distance - worshiped as a saintly genius by his mother, exposed as a grotesquely self-destructive, self-obsessed pervert as the drama unfolds.

The relationship between Sebastian and his mother is possibly the most unsavoury aspect of the film, its nauseating intimacy pungently flavoured by some pretty flagrant allusions to incest.  Mrs Venable isn't just in love with her son, she is pathologically obsessed with him, and it is doubtless her toxic devotion that has made him the self-loathing, corrupting individual he became (Williams' feelings for his own mother have a powerful resonance here, making this his most damning of self-portraits).  Sebastian's efforts to break free of his mother's malign influence by entering a remote Tibetan monastery are thwarted when the woman comes after him, haunting him whilst her own husband lies dying back home.  So devoted is Mrs Venable to her son that she not only accepts his perverted libidinous appetites but also plays the part of a high class pimp, using her wealth and aristocratic bearing to attract a better class of male prostitute.  This task she performs as dutifully as the feeding of insects to her son's precious Venus Flytrap, the prize exhibit in his immaculately maintained and pretty scary private prehistoric jungle.  The widow makes allowance for her son's freakish nature by imagining him to be a great poet, a delusion as monstrous as her belief that she can preserve Sebastian's unblemished reputation by having a lobotomy performed on the only other person to know the truth - her young niece Catherine.

Mrs Venable's objectives may be ill-conceived and wicked in their consequences, but at least her motivation has some thin sliver of legitimacy - a mother's natural instinct to protect her offspring.  The same can hardly be said of Catherine's own mother Mrs Holly, who is all too easily persuaded to have her daughter lobotomised in return for a sufficiently large cheque.  That both women are irredeemably vile and depraved goes without saying, but the comparison with the shallow, vulgar and disgustingly self-interested Mrs Holly makes Mrs Venable a far more sympathetic character than would otherwise have been the case.  What connects the women is a tacit belief that all of society's perceived ills can and should be swept under the carpet, but in this they show themselves to be a far greater menace than the seeming abominations they seek to eradicate.
 
Although Sebastian doesn't get to speak for himself, his own warped personality surfaces periodically in the recollections of both Catherine and his mother.  That the poet has a deeply troubled soul soon becomes apparent through his claim to have seen the true face of God after witnessing an horrific carnage on a beach, with birds of prey swooping down in vast numbers to feed on newly hatched turtles.  This moment of apocalyptic transcendence, a glimpse of nature as it really is, blood red in tooth and claw, was what opened Sebastian's eyes to the ugliness that is inherent in our cosmos.  How can he go on sharing his mother's belief in a benevolent God and a world founded on Christian morality when the whole of creation is nothing more than a grisly forum of meaningless, never-ending violence?  The naked horror that the poet glimpses in this revelatory Munchian flash foreshadows his own gruesome fate - to be torn to pieces and partially devoured by the same hoards of starving pauper boys he had previously bought for sex.

Sebastian's dramatic demise is so utterly bizarre, so deservedly brutal that it can hardly fail to resemble a ritual sacrifice - at least this is impression that we get through Catherine's horrifyingly explicit account at the film's gruesome climax.  Unable to accept the truth of her son's death (the indignity of his murder being no doubt more offensive to her than his sexual misdemeanours), Mrs Venable appears willing to perpetrate an even more abhorrent sacrifice - by robbing her niece Catherine of an independent life through an unwarranted lobotomy.  Thankfully, the good Dr Cukrowicz is on hand to prevent this second atrocity from taking place, having sufficient sense to know that moral judgements are made by humans, not gods, and so must take account of human fallibility.  By compelling Catherine to acknowledge her direct part in Sebastian's terrible death, Cukrowicz finally gets to the truth that has virtually destroyed both women.

By the late 1950s, psychoanalysis was enjoying something of a boom in America, so Suddenly, Last Summer was hardly running against the current by favouring couch therapy over the previously employed medical procedures such as lobotomy and aversion therapy.  Where the film does break new ground is with its overt references to homosexuality, pushing right up against the limits of what was acceptable to Hollywood's rigorously enforced production code.  Today, the film's representation of a gay character can easily be seen as sickeningly negative, although the casting of Clift (a likeable, highly respected gay actor) in a leading role in a film dealing so openly with homosexuality was a brave move.  The film has been widely condemned for the neo-realistic flashback sequence seen towards the end in which Sebastian is pursued through the streets of a Spanish coastal resort by frenzied gangs of youths, in a way that is strikingly reminiscent of the mob attack on Frankenstein's monster in the climax of James Whale's 1931 film for Universal.  The sequence is not only wholly unnecessary (so vividly does Taylor paint the images in our mind that seeing them played out on film adds nothing to their dramatic impact), it also serves to reinforce the bigoted view that homosexuals are a threat to society and therefore worthy of persecution.

Suddenly, Last Summer's treatment of homosexuality is certainly highly problematic, perhaps more so today than when it was first seen.  At the time of its release in 1959, the film had a very mixed reception, winning considerable praise for its lead performances but also a fair amount of bad press for its sordid subject matter.  A menu offering substantial portions of sexual perversion, mental illness and cannibalism was unlikely to go down well with the more strait-laced reviewers and the barrage of negative criticism it unleashed was probably justified.  The film did however pick up three Oscar nominations - in categories of Best Actress (for both Taylor and Hepburn) and Black and White Art Direction - and it also made a very healthy profit, grossing nine million dollars on a budget of just under 6.5 million.  Suddenly, Last Summer may not have attained the classic status of other Southern Gothic offerings of this era, but its bold handling of some highly provocative themes, along with a knockout lead performance from Elizabeth Taylor at her most alluring and blisteringly effective, make it a compelling excursion into the darker places of the human soul.

Film Synopsis

New Orleans, 1937.  Dr John Cukrowicz is an enthusiastic young neurosurgeon whose professional ambitions are frustrated by a lack of resources at the state hospital where he works.  Mrs Violet Venable, an incredibly wealthy widow, offers to bankroll the construction of an entire new wing at the hospital dedicated to neurological treatment.  In return, she asks only that Cukrowicz agrees to perform a lobotomy on her niece Catherine Holly to alleviate her symptoms of extreme psychological disorder.  Meeting the young doctor at her lavish home, Mrs Venable explains that Catherine hasn't been the same since she took a holiday in Europe with her son Sebastian the previous summer.

It was during this fateful vacation that Sebastian, an aspiring poet with a weak physical constitution, succumbed to a heart attack and died.  The widow ardently believes that Catherine's breakdown was caused by her son's sudden death and her subsequent behaviour, which includes making lewd advances towards an older man, made it necessary for her to be placed in a private institution.  Catherine's mother is more than willing to agree to a lobotomy on her daughter, having been offered a huge sum of money by Mrs Venable if she will sign the required authorisation papers.  Reluctant to perform the operation without a clearer understanding of Catherine's condition, Dr Cukrowicz interviews the young woman and attempts to break through the psychological wall that is preventing her from recognising the cause of her mental collapse.

At first, Catherine's evasiveness and impulsive behaviour appear to support Mrs Venable's prognosis that, in her present state, she is a danger to herself and others.  But, gradually, as the sordid truth of Sebastian's life slowly emerges, Dr Cukrowicz starts to see a very different picture.  Determined to release his subject from her mental anxieties, he injects her with a drug that allows her to connect with the tragic events of last summer.  The story that Catherine relates is more shocking than Cukrowicz could ever have imagined, but only by facing the truth will she ever be freed from the grip of the strange neurosis that has taken possession of her...