Suddenly, Last Summer

Talk is never cheap when sourced from Tennessee Williams.

Millionairess, Violet Venable is obsessed with her now dead son, Sebastian. Sebastian met his untimely end whilst on vacation with his cousin Catharine, an end that has sent Catharine almost to the edge of insanity. Violet, very concerned about Catharine and her hurtful ramblings, enlists brain surgeon Dr. Cukrowicz to see if he will perform a lobotomy on the poor girl, but as Cukrowicz digs deeper, motives and facts come crashing together to reveal something far more worrying.

As one expects from a Tennessee Williams adaptation, this picture is very talky, perhaps borderline annoyingly so? Yet it has to be said that for those willing to invest the time with it, the pay off is ...

Howard Hawks defined a good film as three good scenes and no bad ones. Suddenly, Last Summer has four very good scenes dominated by one of the two great great actresses who play the leads or, in one instance, both.

These are long scenes but never boring, and we are at all times bolted to our seats, our eyes glued to the screen; Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor give different, even contrasting performances the one as a crazy, rich, old lady who feigns sanity, the other as a traumatized yet sane young woman who is classified as violent , but the result is in either case nothing short of magnetic : we cant stop looking at Taylor, and we dare not look away from Hepburn (after all of her scenes had been shot, Hepburn reportedly spat i...