Wednesday Minute
No. 109 | June 2, 2010

“Summer” Movies

Our theme this week
“Summer” movies (not soon playing at a theater near you)

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   The Endless Summer (1966)
Tuesday         —   Smiles of a Summer Night (1955)

Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)

Suddenly, Last Summer may have been the most disturbing film I saw as a child.  It’s hardly a children’s film, but it played many times on local television while I was growing up in New York.  We didn’t have many choices back then.  No doubt certain elements of the story were over my head at the time, yet it haunted me.  I could watch a war movie with a thousand men dying in battle and be less troubled than by scenes of madness and cruelty from this twisted tale of Tennessee Williams.  What was so scary?  Plenty, actually, and the icy matriarch played by Katharine Hepburn was part of it.  But the idea that you could have to face a truth so terrible that you might lose your mind was pretty damn frightening.  (The older I got, the better I understood that the fear of admitting uncomfortable truths is not just an aberration.  It’s one of the defining characters of society.)

Elizabeth Taylor stars as Catherine, whose cousin Sebastian died on their vacation in Europe.  Catherine is so distraught after witnessing his death that her family has her institutionalized.  Katherine Hepburn is Mrs. Violet Venable, Sebastian’s wealthy mother, who simply does not want to know the truth about her son.  Good ol’ Aunt Vi tries to force the sanitarium into giving her niece, Catherine, a lobotomy.

A doctor played by Montgomery Clift performs an evaluation of Catherine, and with his encouragement, she at last describes the events of the summer, those days on the beach with Sebastian.  She was the unwitting decoy in Sebastian’s schemes to attract boys for prostitution.  One day he fought with a group of them.  They chased him across town, cornered him, and beat him to death.  Catherine watched the gruesome killing, screamed, but could not help.

Telling the story leaves Catherine shaken, in tears.  But learning the details of her son’s homosexuality and death is more than Mrs. Venable can handle.  She loses her grasp on reality and needs to be taken away.

Director Joseph L. Mankiewicz adapted Williams’s one-act play for the screen, with Gore Vidal getting one of the writing credits.  Some of the more perverse material was tamed down for the film version, notably the cannibalism of Sebastian’s death.  Still, the film had plenty of shock value, certainly more the typical film of the ’50s, and more than anything else I remember seeing on television in those halcyon days before cable TV.

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Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)
Joseph L. Mankiewicz, director
 

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Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)
Joseph L. Mankiewicz, director

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Quote of Note
“Ah, you Americans, you’re advanced in so many ways!  But when it comes to sex, hmm, childish!  Operate on the brain, perform a lobotomy—fine!  But take a pair of testicles and everybody explodes!”
—Dr. Victor Dahlmen (Oscar Beregi Jr.), The Christine Jorgensen Story (1970)

…58…59…60.