Suddenly, Last Summer

Screening on Film

Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz.
With Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, Montgomery Clift.
US, 1959, 35mm, black & white, 114 min.
Print source: Sony Pictures

Mankiewicz's dynamic adaptation of Tennessee William's shocking one-act study of blind love and perverse desire takes Southern Gothic to a luridly dark extreme. Elizabeth Taylor is spellbinding as a young woman traumatized by her beloved cousin's mysterious death and imprisoned in a madhouse by the eccentric millionaire aunt desperate to keep her son's past a secret. A strange erotic triangle emerges when Montgomery Clift's sensitive young neurologist comes between the beautiful patient and Katherine Hepburn's imperious matriarch. The flashback so important to Mankiewicz's cinema gives way to the delirious climax of Suddenly, Last Summer and one of the most cinematographically inventive moments in his entire oeuvre. – HG