Joseph L Mankiewicz (1959)

In Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, his 2014 biography of Tennessee Williams, John Lahr describes the play Suddenly Last Summer[1] as ‘a direct product of Williams’s turmoil on the analyst’s couch’.  The play is set ‘in a sort of festering and fantastical garden … as much a simulacrum of Williams’s unruly interior as it was a production of the decadent poet Sebastian Venable, who tended it.  What has broken Sebastian, in the play – “that string of pearls that old mothers hold their sons by like a – a sort of a – sort of – umbilical cord, long – after …” – was breaking in Williams too’.

The plot centres on the efforts of Sebastian’s ‘old mother’, Violet, to have her niece Catharine Holly lobotomised, so as to prevent the young woman’s revealing the circumstances of Sebastian’s sudden death in Spain – at Cabeza de Lobo in Galicia – the previous year.   Since returning home to America, the traumatised Catharine has been a patient in a New Orleans mental institution – a private institution, with Violet paying the fees.  This scenario too derives from Williams’s own family history – specifically, his persisting guilt that he neglected to oppose his mother’s decision to have a prefrontal lobotomy performed on his schizophrenic sister.  Where Williams failed, Dr Cukrowicz, the neurosurgeon in the play, succeeds.  He injects Catharine with a truth drug.  She tells all and, though too late for Sebastian, breaks his mother’s spell.

A one-act play, Suddenly Last Summer was originally staged off Broadway in January 1958, as one half of a double bill.  (The other half was Something Unspoken.)  It’s testimony to Williams’s appeal to Hollywood at the time that Sam Spiegel, who had just produced The Bridge on the River Kwai and, three years before that, On the Waterfront, quickly acquired the screen rights to the play.  There had already been films of The Glass Menagerie (1950), A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and The Rose Tattoo (1955); Cat on a Hot Tin Roof would arrive in cinemas later in 1958.  These, however, were all full-length plays:  Suddenly Last Summer would require expansion to be turned into a feature film – and its contentious themes were more salient than in Williams’s earlier work.  John McCarten’s scathing New Yorker review of the resulting screen adaptation – shot in black-and-white, starring Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn and Montgomery Clift – described it as ‘a preposterous and monotonous potpourri of incest, homosexuality, psychiatry, and, so help me, cannibalism’.  Variety found Suddenly, Last Summer ‘the most bizarre motion picture ever made by a major American company’ (Columbia).

While Spiegel was still fighting censorship battles with the Production Code Administration in America over Gore Vidal’s screenplay, production of the film began at Shepperton Studios in mid-1959[2], and was plagued with further strife – mostly the consequences of difficulties in the personal lives of two of the three stars, and the effect of these on working relationships.  Elizabeth Taylor, the biggest box-office draw in the world, had been widowed in March 1958, when Mike Todd, her third husband, died in a plane crash.  She had married her fourth, Todd’s friend Eddie Fisher, a couple of weeks before the Suddenly, Last Summer shoot began:  the preceding affair with Fisher, married to Debbie Reynolds at the time, had caused a scandal.  Taylor insisted that her dear friend Montgomery Clift, now uninsurable as an actor, play Dr Cukrowicz.  Zonked, trembling and in no fit to state to play anyone, Clift exasperated Joseph Mankiewicz, who repeatedly tried and failed to have him replaced.  Katharine Hepburn thought so badly of Mankiewicz’s treatment of Clift that, before taking leave of the set for the last time, she spat in the director’s face.  In spite of all this and the mixed reviews it received, the film was a commercial hit.

Introducing a screening of Suddenly, Last Summer in NFT1, BFI National Archive Curator Simon McCallum speculated that the film’s box-office success owed a lot to the theatrical release poster, dominated by an image of Elizabeth Taylor – or, at least, an artist’s (vague) impression of her – in a low-cut white bathing costume.  (The tagline, in big crimson letters above the Taylor figure, was, accurately enough, ‘THESE ARE POWERS AND PASSIONS WITHOUT PRECEDENT IN MOTION PICTURES!’)   It’s true that punters who bought a ticket hoping to see the real Taylor in this outfit eventually got what they came for, though some would surely have been disappointed by having to wait nearly two hours for a short-lived reward.

The BFI audience, despite the introduction they heard, was noticeably quiet and seemingly attentive.  I don’t mean to disparage Simon McCallum:  what he had to say was well prepared (I’d guess, from his selection of quotes, with the help of the film’s Wikipedia entry), informative and entertaining but it was also instructive – perhaps more instructive than he intended – about the rapid change in attitudes towards some of the subject matter.  McCallum started by asking if there were any ‘Suddenly, Last Summer virgins’ in the audience (there were).  He ended with John McCarten’s New Yorker broadside.  McCallum found this far from off-putting:  it, rather, promised ‘a hoot’.

On his exotic annual travels, Sebastian Venable preys on the male youth of whichever locale he’s visiting.  His mother was always his holiday companion until the fatal summer, when Catharine replaced her – supposedly because of Violet’s ill health, actually because she was getting too old to act as effective ‘bait’ and to procure boys for her son.  Simon McCallum virtually dismissed the idea that Suddenly, Last Summer explored a ‘dark side to’ male homosexuality on the grounds that Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal were themselves gay.  Noting that Williams had explained the cannibalism element as illustrating a widespread human tendency, regardless of sexual preference, for ‘people to devour other people’, McCallum also quoted Vidal’s funny put-down of the extras in the film’s Spanish sequences – ‘those overweight ushers from the Roxy Theatre on Fire Island pretending to be small ravenous boys’ – by way of confirmation that both he and Williams were untroubled by their sexuality.

The Vidal quote, as McCallum mentioned, features in a work by the film historian Vito Russo.  It’s called The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies and the ‘closet’ here is significant in considering how serious a work Williams felt his ‘potpourri of incest, homosexuality, psychiatry and … cannibalism’ to be.   According to the Psychology Today website[3], the American classification of mental disorders (‘DSM’), first published in 1968, included homosexuality until 1973; between then and 1987, DSM adjusted the reference to ‘sexual orientation disturbance’ in people ‘in conflict with’ their sexual orientation.   In other words, the first publication of the DSM occurred a decade after the first staging of Suddenly Last Summer and homosexuality was unequivocally removed from the list of disorders four years after Tennessee Williams’s death.  There was powerful cultural pressure on gay men of his generation (and the younger generation of Gore Vidal, in his early sixties by 1987) to think of their sexuality as something pathological.  This isn’t to imply that Williams did, or that Sebastian was the outlandish expression of his own ‘shadow’ side; but in the mid-twentieth century, homosexuality, even in creative milieus, wasn’t easy to be comfortable with, let alone easy to proclaim.  This sometimes made for an ‘unruly interior’.  Watching Montgomery Clift in the film is a continual reminder of that.

Williams was scathing about Mankiewicz’s film and disowned the shared screenplay credit he received.  Not hard to see why:  Suddenly, Last Summer is ridiculous in several respects, and offensive in others.  It’s par for the course for a movie adaptation of a stage play to open out the material.  Doing so in this case has a doubly negative effect.  In the theatre, the whole play takes place in the Venable mansion, the ‘interior …blended with a fantastic garden that is more like a tropical jungle’.  Mankiewicz and Vidal move much of the action not only to the private institution where Catharine (Elizabeth Taylor) is a patient, but also to the under-resourced state mental hospital where she later receives treatment from Cukrowicz (Montgomery Clift):  the wealthy Violet (Katharine Hepburn) is offering the hospital a handsome endowment in exchange for the lobotomy she wants on Catharine.  The multiple locations not only dilute the drama (and the impact of Oliver Messel’s garden-jungle design) but also supply an opportunity, in the state hospital, to portray the inmates in garish, traditional Hollywood style – as a collection of eye-catching crazies, giggling or gibbering or weeping to themselves.   It’s an opportunity that Mankiewicz, shockingly for a film-maker of his talents, doesn’t miss.  When Catharine wanders into the male patients’ area, Jack Hildyard’s camera pans across a sea of greedily lustful, grinning faces and a couple of the men try to grab her.  Mankiewicz makes clear at the start that the action is taking place in 1937 – as if to stress that, twenty-two years on, mental hospital conditions have improved.  But this representation of the devouring theme is in terrible taste.

The beginning of the film isn’t what you expect (or what I’d remembered:  I’d seen it at least once before).  The first person to appear on screen is an uncredited Rita Webb[4], as one of the patients in the women’s area at the state hospital.  Then comes a sequence in the hospital’s operating theatre – a dilapidated converted library – where Cukrowicz, introduced by a senior colleague (Albert Dekker), performs a lobotomy before an audience of medical students.  Although Rita Webb’s characterisation is instantly strong and admirably sympathetic, these scenes are padding:  the story doesn’t get properly underway until Cukrowicz’s first visit to Violet’s home.

At the end of Williams’s play, after Catharine has given her account of what really happened to Sebastian at Cabeza de Lobo, Violet exits, her furious closing instruction – ‘State asylum, cut this hideous story out of her brain!’ – delivered offstage.  Cukrowicz has the last word, carefully expressed:  ‘I think we ought at least to consider the possibility that the girl’s story could be true …‘   The film substitutes for this movie cliché – two parts melodrama, one part romance.   Catharine’s account has such a devastating effect on Violet that she promptly goes mad, imagining that Sebastian has returned to life, as Cukrowicz.  For Catharine, on the other hand, the effect of telling the truth is cathartic and instantly curative.  She and Cukrowicz, who’ve already kissed passionately, walk away from the camera together, apparently in the direction of happy ever after.

Moments like these might seem to justify experiencing Suddenly, Last Summer as the delirious camp-fest that Simon McCallum offered – and they’re not the only such moments.  The film can be amusing, even beguiling, when it creates a striking effect that may not be fully intentional – for example, a scene in which Catharine is sedated by a young male nurse (David Cameron).   Already woozy, she comments on Dr Kucrowicz’s blue eyes and how surprising it is he’s not blonde-haired.  The nurse is blonde and tells her as much.  Catharine replies:

‘Are you?   Funny.   We were going to blondes next.   Blondes were next on the menu.  … All last summer, Sebastian was famished for blondes.   Fed up with the dark ones.   Famished for blondes.  The travel brochures he picked up… …were advertisements of blonde, northern countries.  Think he’d already booked us to Stockholm and Copenhagen.  Fed up with the dark ones, famished for the light ones.  That’s the way he talked about people, as if they were… …items on a menu.’

As Catharine drifts into unconsciousness, the nurse, who has Viking hero looks (and later intervenes to prevent her attempting suicide), might be part of her dreams, an expression of Sebastian’s fantasy.

There’s no denying either that aspects of the casting increase the temptation to see the piece as a beyond tasteless classic. (BFI can’t be entirely serious in giving it a ‘Big Screen Classics’ slot in their programme.)  When the male patients lick their lips at the sight of a beautiful woman, it’s impossible – even as you disapprove – not to laugh inwardly too:  Catharine isn’t any beautiful woman, she’s Elizabeth Taylor.  Knowing that Montgomery Clift was a nervous wreck at the time, you watch him performing a lobotomy with apprehension.   Thank goodness that, at this early stage, we’ve not yet seen Clift’s hands shaking – as we do in the scene in which Cukrowicz holds up Sebastian’s death certificate to read.

There’s nothing to suggest, however, that the main actors aren’t taking the enterprise seriously and they make the film absorbing to watch.  It’s only my impression but the silence in NFT1 sounded like an almost shocked, increasingly respectful one.  Katharine Hepburn’s dominating presence and idiosyncratic delivery are right for Violet Venable:  Hepburn is so naturally extraordinary and commanding that she animates effortlessly this florid conception of the all-consuming mother.  Needless to say, she’s thoroughly convincing too as a high-bred woman who calls her private secretary (Mavis Villiers) by her surname.  Elizabeth Taylor isn’t so well cast.  She lacks the naïvete that Catharine needs; there’s no hint of kinship with her mother (Mercedes McCambridge) or brother (Gary Raymond), the poor (money-grubbing) relations whom Violet so despises.  Taylor is very fine, though, in delivering Catharine’s climactic monologue, building to a description of the lethal assault on Sebastian by the Spanish beggar boys.  Whether or not it’s true that her inconsolability, on completion of the take, was because Taylor ‘had tapped into her grief over the 1958 death of her third husband Mike Todd’ (Wikipedia), it’s a powerful piece of acting.

The intrusion of personal experience into Montgomery Clift’s work is less successful because it in no way articulates with the character he’s playing.  It’s true Dr Cukrowicz isn’t much of a role. Williams not only blurs the distinction between neuroscience and psychotherapy.  He also uses the doctor as a lay audience’s proxy in his repeatedly astonished reactions to what he hears from Catharine (and Violet).  But Clift, looking more fragile and enervated than anyone else on screen, is distracting and distracted.  He seems almost to be acting from memory – ironic as that sounds, given that he kept forgetting his words.  It’s only occasionally that he connects with a line or something that another actor does.  Yet the off-screen baggage has its touching side too.  Clift visibly relaxes in his scenes with Elizabeth Taylor, a trusted, loyal friend.  Although this relaxation makes no sense in the context of the doctor-patient relationship they’re interpreting, it makes the film’s ending feel less nonsensical than it should.

Freudian family dramas, in which kids are driven by parents or parental hang-ups into mental breakdown, were in vogue at the time Suddenly, Last Summer was made but it isn’t really that kind of film – the protagonist and antagonist aren’t child and parent, for a start – even though the process of stretching the source material introduces a few familiar details.  Williams’s play blends macabre and lyrical but it’s dramatically thin.  When Violet, on their first meeting, tells Cukrowicz of her visit with Sebastian to the Galapagos Islands, and describes the attack on newly-hatched sea turtles by carnivorous birds, she’s giving away the ending – especially since a Venus flytrap has pride of place in her son’s garden-jungle.

Joseph Mankiewicz clearly didn’t think much of the play, calling it ‘badly constructed … based on the most elementary Freudian psychology’, and it’s not obvious why he agreed to direct.   (With the qualified exception of the later Cleopatra, for which he shared the writing credit, Mankiewicz was most successful when directing his own screenplays – A Letter to Three Wives, All About Eve, The Barefoot Contessa.)   He does have his moments here, though.  The ending he supposedly foisted on Gore Vidal is silly – it’s possible even to see it as an expression of Mankiewicz’s lack of respect for the piece – but what goes just before is the highlight of Suddenly, Last Summer.  There are a couple of judicious reaction shots of Violet but Mankiewicz largely keeps the camera on Elizabeth Taylor throughout Catharine’s telling of her gruesome story.  Taylor’s face, on the right-hand side of the frame, often shares it with, and is occasionally replaced by, images of the events that she’s recounting.  (The white-suited Sebastian (Julián Ugarte), although his face is never seen, is on screen for several minutes as he tries to flee the ‘ravenous boys’ whose physique so dissatisfied Vidal.)  At first, you think the visualisation of her account will detract from Catharine’s monologue.  In the event, the two things develop a compelling synergy.  You may, unlike me, find it a hoot but you won’t look away.

18 September 2019

[1] The play’s title doesn’t include a comma.  The film’s does.

[2] The beach and castle sequences in Cabeza de Lobo were shot in various Spanish locations.

[3] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/201509/when-homosexuality-stopped-being-mental-disorder

[4] The BFI programme note wrongly identified this ‘patient in rocking chair’ as Hylda Baker.  IMDb confirms it’s (the unmistakable) Rita Webb.