When I saw mention of “Suddenly, Last Summer” on a list of film noir recommendations, my first thought was “Wait? It’s more than just a song by The Motels?*”
*Humblebrag: In my career as a musician, I was in a band that opened for the Motels, though long after their heyday.
In fact, it was also a film, released in 1959, starring Montgomery Clift, Katherine Hepbern and Elizabeth Tailor and written by Tennesse Williams and Gore Vidal. We’re talking some real heavy hitters.
The setup: Montgomery Clift’s neurosurgeon gets an offer from Katharine Hepburn’s wealthy dowager. “Lobotomize my institutionalized niece,” she says, “and I’ll fund the efforts to restore the decrepit psychiatric hospital you work in.” These are not her exact words, because it’s written by prose-master* Williams and set in 1930s New Orleans where such things are only intimated, never spelled out.
* At one point Hepburn eloquently opines: “Most people’s lives, what are they but … long trails of debris, with nothing to clean it all up but death.” Cheery thought.
Clift’s character agrees to the offer, but as he interacts with the niece, played by Elizabeth Taylor, he suspects something dastardly is afoot. It all comes down to the question of what happened last summer, (rather suddenly, in fact) when the niece and the matriarch’s son were vacationing in Europe.
This movie has a lot I like. Repressed memory, Freudian themes, psychosexual drama, (or, to use a term used in the movie, erotomania)… that’s all my bag, baby.
What I didn’t like: The endless talking, people droning on and on. Even William’s masterful command of language and dialogue gets long winded when you’re trying to understand a mystery that’s being revealed in drips and drabs. As New York Times reviewer Bosley Crowther said when the film came out, “Mr. Williams and Gore Vidal … have indulged in sheer verbal melodramatics which have a small effect on the screen and are barely elevated from tedium by some incidental scenes of inmates of a mental institution.” (Man, they knew how to write back then.)
Complaints aside, “Suddenly, Last Summer” is worth seeing, if only for a certain nostalgia.And if you do see it, tell me if you think a certain scene was the inspiration for Freddy’s Krueger origin as revealed in “Nightmare on Elm Street Part III.”
