SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER (1959)

In 1937 New Orleans, Dr. John Cukrowicz works at a state asylum where he is honing his skills in neurosurgery (called "psychosurgery" by his boss, Dr. Hockstader). He gives a demonstration for a small audience of students, performing a lobotomy, and is noticeably frustrated by what he calls the "primitive surgical conditions" under which he has to work. When the wealthy Violet Venable reads an article in the paper about his work, she contacts Hockstader, offering to fund a new wing of the building if John will consider performing a lobotomy on her niece Catherine. The backstory: Violet's son Sebastian, a sensitive boy who considered himself a poet and artist, took long summer vacations with his mother. But last summer, with the aging Violet not up to a trip, Sebastian went traveling with his lovely cousin Catherine. He died under mysterious circumstances on a Mediterranean island; the coroner's report says he had a heart attack while walking on the street, but Catherine witnessed something different which has driven her into a mental institution. John visits Catherine and finds her sane enough in conversation until she is pushed to recall Sebastian's death; she says it happened at the hands of a mob of homeless boys, then becomes hysterical. John agrees to treat her but not necessarily with surgery. Catherine, in the presence of John and Violet, is eventually able to relate what happened last summer, and in doing so, moves herself toward health but drives Violet to a breakdown.

[Spoilers are inevitable.] This psychological Gothic drama is based on a one-act play by Tennessee Williams which is fairly open about its themes of incest, homosexuality, sex trafficking, and revenge, all presented in dialogue rather than onstage action. But because the movie was produced under the strictures of the Hollywood Production Code (weakening but still present), most of the above must be interpreted by the audience from between the lines and from incomplete visual imagery. Sebastian was a hedonistic homosexual who used his mother to procure young men and boys for sex overseas. We're told that Sebastian treated these people as though they were "items on a menu." When Mom became older and less useful in procurement (a word used by Catherine), he got his young cousin to accompany him. At the end of that last Mediterranean trip, Catherine said he had tired of the dark-skinned boys surrounding him and, "famished for blonds," wanted to head to the Nordic lands. We're not sure what triggers the climax, but as Sebastian tries to get away from the boys on the beach and the streets, they chase him to a ruined temple where he is surrounded, mutilated, and partially eaten by the poor street youths. We assume that he paid the boys for sex and that his leaving the island would have cut off a supply of cash. The story, as told by Catherine near the end of the film, is visualized though not explicitly—the boys encircle him and he is dragged down to the ground, his grasping arm rising briefly above the churning mass. Though the language of sexual behavior is not used, an audience member today would have to be willfully ignorant not to pick up what has happened. As far as I'm concerned, the phrases "items on a menu" and "famished for blonds" are more evocative than using words like "gay" or "promiscuous" would have been. 

The first time I saw this, sometime in the 1980s, I was disappointed as I was watching it for titillation and scandal, and by that era, it just didn't cut it. But this time around, I was much more impressed. Gore Vidal's screenplay (with Williams co-credited) is talky but fascinating. Things feel padded out in the middle, but the first half hour, which mostly consists of a long scene of dialogue between Katherine Hepburn (Violet) and Montgomery Clift (John), both pictured at top right, is thrillingly acted by Hepburn, who brings to mind the heiresses of The Philadelphia Story and Bringing Up Baby mixed with the drug addled Mary Tyrone of Long Day's Journey Into Night (which Hepburn would film a couple of years later). Elizabeth Taylor (Catherine), pictured at left, chews the scenery, especially in the last 15 minutes which is largely a monologue from her about what she witnessed, but it's called for. She and Hepburn are forces of nature and we'd be disappointed if Taylor held back. Clift is less impressive as he spends most of the movie reacting to others, but he's fine. Gary Raymond, whom I mostly know from TV as the British sergeant in the 60s war drama The Rat Patrol, is effective in a small role as Sebastian's weasley brother George, though Mercedes McCambridge is mostly wasted as Sebastian's weak mother. I liked seeing character actor Albert Dekker, the bespectacled mad scientist in Dr. Cyclops, as John's boss. Hepburn gets a startling moment when she describes watching, with Sebastian, an incident on the Galapagos Islands in which flesh eating birds blacken the sky as they eat newly hatched baby turtles off the beach. She says Sebastian saw the "face of God" then, which nicely sets up Sebastian's own fate. Catherine, the truth teller, leaves us with two memorable tidbits: that perhaps "love is using people" and that we are like "children in a vast kindergarten trying to spell God's name with the wrong alphabet blocks." I admit I chuckled a bit at that, but it stuck with me. Highly recommended as long as you're up for two hours of talk and great acting. [TCM]