Suddenly, Last Summer

Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), based on a one-act play of the same title by Tennessee Williams, was written and produced in a decade when psychiatry had become the solution to all human problems. Montgomery Clift plays Dr. Cukrowicz, a psychologist who is asked to examine Catherine Holly (Elizabeth Taylor), a young woman who has been hospitalized since a traumatic event the summer before, an event she cannot remember. The event involved the death of her close friend , Sebastian, whose mother, Violet Venable (Katherine Hepburn) is intent on having Catherine lobotomized so that she will be cured of her insanity. As events unfold there are hints of another reason why Mrs. Venable wants Catherine to have a lobotomy--so that she won’t disclose the true nature of her son’s death.

Cukrowicz’s challenge is to decide whether Catherine is truly insane, and therefore in need of a lobotomy, or whether she can be compelled to remember the details of her traumatic ordeal and therefore be cured. Oh that life were so simple. The film treats psychiatry, lobotomies, and insanity without much accuracy. The Freudian psychology that underlies the film’s notion of how Catherine’s insanity can be cured—by Dr. Cukrowicz’s forcing her to remember the horrible events of “last summer”—is presented in a simplistic, reductive way.

In Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, the main character Jack Burden watches brain surgery performed by his friend Adam Stanton. For Adam, the brain is merely an organ, the physiological center of the mind, but for Jack it is the place of human identity, of the self, the soul. After observing the surgery, Jack decides that human life can be reduced down to a Big Twitch, the sort of twitch that can be prompted by an electric shock in the severed leg of a frog—a naturalistic expression of life’s meaninglessness and God’s absence.

The same notion is at issue in Suddenly, Last Summer. If Clift performs the surgery, Catherine may be cured, but she may also be left permanently disabled. If he performs the surgery, Mrs. Venable will donate enough money to renovate and modernize the state mental hospital. The hospital director pressures him to perform the surgery. The small fortune that Sebastian left to Catherine in his will has been signed over to her mother and brother because of her purported insanity. Catherine is reduced to object level: her sanity, her mind, and her life are caught up in the web of intrigue surrounding Sebastian’s death and his mother’s wealth and power.

The film’s Southernness is incidental to the plot, but we find several characteristic elements here: the deranged old Southern matriarch, power and corruption, insanity, the obsession with a hidden event from the past, the broken down, decrepit hospital where society’s disfigured and unwanted are conveniently hidden away. But for Tennessee Williams, one of the fundamental aspects of Southernness is repression. Mrs. Venable, the film gradually and obliquely reveals, doesn’t want the true nature of her son’s death divulged because her son’s homosexuality will be revealed. He attracted men by relying on his mother, and later Taylor, to attract them: Catherine says that she “procured” for the boy. In some cases, at least according to the film, he paid for sexual favors from men and boys. This element was more explicit in the one-act play, but in the film it is camouflaged and toned down. I have not read the play, but the treatment of homosexuality in the film implies self-loathing on Williams’ part.

Nonetheless, the film makes clear enough Sebastian’s personal preferences. The film itself was significantly edited to remove overt references to homosexuality. Even so, it was one of the earliest films to deal with homosexuality in a way clear enough that the audience could actually recognize the subject. A Streetcar Names Desire treats the subject indirectly through the repressed character of Blanche DuBois, and though Stanley Kowalski’s intense sexuality. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof dealt with Brick's former attraction to his dead friend in relatively candid fashion, though the film version virtually removed all references to the nature of their friendship.

Taylor’s acting is excellent in this film. Katherine Hepburn is mannered and eccentric, and effective, and Montgomery Clift, in a post-accident performance, is wooden and repressed. He lived the life, of course, that the film is about.

Suddenly, Last Summer is more about hysteria than anything else—especially in the performances by Taylor and Hepburn. The way that Sebastian supposedly dies—torn to shreds by a group of men and boys—seems hard to accept. Maybe it is supposed to be Catherine’s hallucination, a delusion that stands for something else, but what? The ending shows the psychologist and his amazingly cured patient walking off together in a way that suggests a romantic future for them. This was clichéd, formulaic, and implausible.

And Hepburn, raving, ascends on her personal elevator to the upper floors of her mansion. For me, this was the overwhelming image in the film.

Hugh Ruppersburg
Athens, Georgia