Based on the 1958 play by Gore Vidal’s close friend Tennessee Williams, this was an adaptation Vidal wrote while under contract to MGM. The play was the third written by Williams in which he dealt with homosexuality, following A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Suddenly, Last Summer, however, broached the topic much more explicitly than the two earlier films. In the depiction of the gay Sebastian Venable—told through flashbacks—the Production Code Administration gave the filmmakers special dispensation declaring, "Since the film illustrates the horrors of such a lifestyle, it can be considered moral in theme even though it deals with sexual perversion."

Mankiewicz’ spellbinding drama featured top stars—including a luminous Elizabeth Taylor, an unhinged Katharine Hepburn and a post-accident Montgomery Clift—in a delirious unravelling of family trauma. Williams told The Village Voice in 1973 that the film ran too far afield from his original play and "made [him] throw up." Vidal criticized the climactic ending, which had been altered by the director, and Mankiewicz himself blamed the source material, describing the play as "badly constructed ... based on the most elementary Freudian psychology."