• Suddenly, Last Summer (1959 film), 7/2/25 (Wed)
• Suddenly Last Summer (1993 BBC), 7/3/25 (Thurs)

I learned after watching Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s wild and starry movie version of Tennessee Williams’ one-act play, filmed only a year after its off Broadway debut, that the stage show itself was presented more or less unchanged on the BBC many years later. That comparison was too tempting to pass up.

Violet Venable, a rich widow in New Orleans, is still mourning the loss of her beloved son Sebastian, a poet who died suddenly the previous summer from a heart attack on a vacation in Spain. She is offering to finance a new hospital wing with just one condition – that her niece Catharine, currently confined to a mental institution, is treated by the new lobotomy specialist. She explains that Catharine has gone crazy after witnessing Sebastian’s death, obliquely blaming Catharine for the tragedy. It seems that Mrs. Venable had traveled every summer with her son, who she clearly worshipped (“Sebastian saw the face of God”), but, to her fury, had been displaced on the last trip by her niece.

The doctor is wary of making any promises regarding the highly experimental surgery until he can speak with the patient. He comes under further pressure from Catharine’s mother and elder brother, who stand to inherit a significant sum from Sebastian’s will if Mrs. Venable gives her approval. They hope to convince Catharine to agree to the procedure – for her own health, of course.

Meanwhile, the doctor finds that Catharine has her own version of the story that throws the events in a significantly different light. After much drama, he manages to get everyone together in Mrs. Venable’s home and injects Catharine with a relaxant. (She asks if it’s a truth serum. Told that there is no such thing, she responds, “The truth, doctor, or the serum?”) She reveals to everyone’s shock that she was acting as Sebastian’s “procurer”, wearing skimpy bathing suits to lure boys on his behalf so that he could throw money at them and enjoy their company. Until last summer, he had taken the mother on the trip every year for the same purpose, but, disabled by a stroke, she was no longer attractive enough for the work. Catharine describes how he was eventually set upon by a crowd of the poor boys he exploited and was murdered by them in the streets, literally torn to pieces and possibly cannibalized (I hope that’s her fevered imagination talking). Mrs. Venable, hysterical at hearing her son exposed, screams furiously that her son was “chaste” and that her niece is lying. She is removed forcibly from the room (I thought of Blanche Dubois) while shrieking to the doctor to “cut this hideous story from her brain!” The doctor concludes that Catharine’s story sounds entirely plausible.

The BBC version does use multiple angles and sets but is reportedly a fairly faithful reproduction of the stage show lasting a tight 80 minutes. The film has expanded on this with added scenes and characters and horror, most notably in the mental institution where Katharine is accosted by male patients and later almost commits suicide. The new opening scene with the hospital chief is a nice touch, but the play proves generally that less is more given Williams’ vivid writing style and the gothic story. The long monologues, most of which are left intact, make this a stagy film anyway, but the high quality of the script (by Gore Vidal; Williams is credited but says that he was not involved) makes up for that.

The nature of film badly undercuts the Spanish sequences at the end, which are better imagined than seen. The music, the hot streets, Sebastian himself (though his face was quite rightly never shown), the chase – the film makes it all too real, which oddly makes it feel fake. I’m assuming in particular that Catharine’s cannibalism recollections are meant to be metaphorical, indicating an extremely violent end rather than actual flesh-munching kids; while the film scene could represent her confused memory, the brutality makes it too real to ignore. The play comes off much better in that sense. The scene was foreshadowed by the repeated mention of flesh-eating birds, the skeleton statue, and the carnivorous Venus fly trap, but I’m going to keep believing that it was symbolic, the predator becoming the victim.

Katharine Hepburn’s Mrs. Venable was wonderfully demented from the start, whereas Maggie Smith is more deviously ladylike, maintaining an imperious cool and only letting go in that climactic scene. Hepburn’s approach was more cartoonish but, given the material, perfectly appropriate. Interestingly, she spoke in her own voice, while the British Maggie spoke in a Southern accent. Hepburn was much better at my favorite passage: “I’ve buried a husband and a son. I’m a widow and a… Funny, there’s no word. Lose your parents, you’re an orphan. Lose your only son and you are… Nothing.”

Elizabeth Taylor got mixed reviews for her performance, but I’m with the positives. It’s a talky film in general, but her line deliveries made her speeches credible (“Is that what love is? Using people? And maybe that’s what hate is – not being able to use people.”). Her description of her trip to Spain felt exaggerated, but not much she could do about it considering the lurid writing. She certainly looked the part; her scene in that sheer white swimsuit was used on the poster for the movie, meaning the filmmakers were basically using her as a lure just like Sebastian did. While Natasha Richardson didn’t get that chance, she had a softer approach to the material that worked in its own way.

Montgomery Clift seemed out of it, mouthing the lines without any evident connection to them. He was apparently drugged up after a debilitating auto accident two years earlier and hired only at Taylor’s insistence; he was reportedly almost fired at one point. Granted it’s not much of a role – Rob Lowe couldn’t do much with it either, but at least he looked invested in the material. In the film cast, Mercedes McCambridge was the most memorable among the rest as Catherine’s dizzy mother. The play cast was not particularly distinguished other than the principals.

This is Southern Gothic bordering on camp. The film and filmed play each give us two powerful performances at center. The BBC (which seems to have been filmed through gauze – or is that a bad copy?) takes a more conservative approach, building its story gradually, while the film grabs us from the beginning. I would recommend the film for its take-no-prisoners approach despite the unnecessary added bits. There was evidently plenty of drama behind the scenes as well: Hepburn spit in the director’s face after filming, Taylor was dealing with her husband’s sudden death and stealing Debbie Reynolds’ husband, Clift was a royal pain on set and couldn’t remember his lines, and so forth. Still, none of that hurt the ferocity of the finished product. It’s certainly never boring.