Review of Suddenly Last Summer (2012) by Blake P — 22 Aug 2014

Katharine Hepburn plays an evil aunt. Elizabeth Taylor raises her voice to glass-shattering heights but smokes her way through a packet of cigarettes as the seemingly out-of-her-mind niece. Montgomery Clift is a brain surgeon who must decide whether or not to lobotomize Elizabeth Taylor, as Katharine Hepburn so desperately wants. "Suddenly, Last Summer" sounds batty, and it is batty.

Based on Tennessee Williams' one-act play, which dealt with all sorts of taboo themes of the time (homosexuality, incest, cannibalism, pedophilia, you name it), "Suddenly, Last Summer" had controversy stamped on its forehead. The film version, thanks to the Hays Code, is watered down, but there are enough subtle jabs to get a glimpse of the undertones of the play. Williams himself may have denounced the screenplay he supposedly wrote, but somehow, "Suddenly, Last Summer" manages to work, even if it goes from thoughtful to Southern-fried.

The film opens with a lobotomy; surrounded by young medical students, the lead surgeon is Dr. John Cukrowicz (Clift). The surgery is plagued with many different issues: a light bulb goes out and Cukrowicz's assistants don't seem to know what they're doing. The tone of the film is set. "Suddenly, Last Summer" is covered in sweat and nothing ever seems to go the way it's supposed to. It's better that way.

Cukrowicz is informed that the wealthy Violet Venable (Hepburn) wants to see him, as she desperately wants a lobotomy performed on her niece, Catherine Holly (Taylor). Venable's beloved son, Sebastian, has just died, under mysterious circumstances, no less, and the last person to see him was Catherine.

Since his demise, Catherine has been labeled as insane by nearly everyone around her. Cukrowicz's visits with her, and it's clear that Catherine isn't out-of-her-mind whatsoever; but it is also apparent that Sebastian's death isn't all that it seems, and Violet might know more than she's letting on.

Without all of its sordid themes, much of the gusto "Suddenly, Last Summer" had is disintegrated, adding subplots that weaken the punch of the play's climax. The romance between Clift and Taylor is ludicrous - even if it was a romance movie instead of a Gothic melodrama, Clift is so wooden that any chemistry the two famously had before isn't evident.

There are plenty of inspired bits that may not have worked in 1959 but do today: Hepburn's first scene is fittingly over-the-top and a tad bit campy, and Taylor's entire performance seems like a precursor to the madness she would later show in 1966's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?".

Her finest moment is certainly her ending monologue, but the most joyously insane scene in the film arrives when her character stumbles into the men's recreational room at the asylum. In this scene, her legs are grabbed, she screams at the top of her lungs, and the orchestral music is blaring. It's a moment of sheerly unhinged soap opera that adds nothing to the film, but remains its best scene anyway.

"Suddenly, Last Summer" isn't uneven, because it knows what it is: off-the-rails. But sometimes, the melodrama is so exaggerated that mastery turns into theatrics, and it doesn't suit the film well.