Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2625 in DVD
• Released on: 2000-08-15
• Rating: Unrated
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Black & White, Color, DVD-Video, Full Screen, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: Chinese, English, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 114 minutes

Amazon.com essential video
This black-and-white film adaptation of Tennessee Williams's Southern gothic play is perhaps more famous for the rumored off-screen shenanigans of its stars than for its over-the-top repressed sexuality (only Williams could pull off that paradox, and pull it off he does). Supposedly, stars Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor battled for screen time; Hepburn warred very publicly with director Joseph Mankiewicz; and a postaccident Montgomery Clift relied heavily on painkillers and support from friend Taylor during the grueling shoot. Even this, however, cannot top the events of the film itself, revolving around the unseen playboy Sebastian and his mysterious death, which has something to do with young boys, a decadent European vacation, and Taylor in a provocative wet, white bathing suit. To give away the plot would spoil the fun, but suffice it to say that what Taylor saw was so horrible it drove her nuts, and Sebastian's mother (Hepburn) wants her to have a lobotomy in order to keep it from coming out; Clift is brought in to do the procedure. It's all a hoot and a holler, but as played by the two leading ladies (both of whom nabbed Oscar nominations), it's also compelling, chilling, and utterly gothic. Taylor gives a fierce performance, as the climaxing monologue that reveals Sebastian's "secret" rests entirely on her shoulders, and Hepburn plays brilliantly against type as Sebastian's manipulating, overbearing mother. Only Clift, saddled with a dreary character in charge of plot exposition, fails to deliver. Adapted by Gore Vidal. --Mark Englehart

Customer Reviews

eh...
Interesting movie, sad, a little depressing. I had to buy this for a film class. Didn't love it for its entertainment value. It was thought-provoking.

JOSEPH L. MANKIEWICZ, OPUS 16
***** 1959. Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, this adaptation from Tennessee Williams' Suddenly Last Summer. earned three nominations for the Academy Awards and Elizabeth Taylor a Golden Globe. Outstanding screenplay by the American writer filled with symbols and cymbals. Masterpiece.

Suddenly, an outlaw film!
If there was something interesting to remark about this bold and brave decade of the Fities was the fact many overlooked issues were exposed for the posterity. This film is part of the sextet of demolishing movies (The man of the golden arm, Baby Doll Butterfly 8, A long and hot summer and Anatomy of a murder).

"Suddenly last summer" was an audacious step in those times in which certain aspects of the intimate life had to be enclosed.

But the brilliant intelligence of the author, made of this existential dramatis personae, a distant consequence and not the primary plot, and he focused around the position of domination of a very wealthy Southern matriarch, her supposedly mad niece and a neurosurgeon.

The dialogues are pieces of the play. They reveal, suggest and mask the used conventionalisms, the well exposed moral codes, the well known device of transfer of blame. However the neurosurgeon is aware there is something nasty beneath the speech and decides to find out much more the words may describe.

Tennessee Williams was a sharp writer, and like a prominent artist, you may not conform yourself with a lineal approach. Obviously, the author proposes us the words may even disfigure not only a human life, but the most important (thinking at a major level) the relevance of the speech as lethal weapon in order to destroy the reputation of any human being (the black list of the previous decade, perhaps?).

At the dramatic resolution, we are aware what really happened and whosoever was out of the real context in this world, when our venerable matriarch's projects, and the embodiment of her elusive fantasies on the own neurosurgeon in the last sequence, in which we may watch her as Gloria Swanson in "Sunset boulevard", a lonely and disassociated woman trapped in her vanished dreams.

Potent and mature film, and even though at this historical moments you might regard it out date, think it twice due Philadelphia in 1993, caused a very similar impact.