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I honestly hope you don't identify yourself with the chaacters...
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One of the best TV movies ever -- Hepburn, Olivier and Cukor all won Emmy awards:
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Oddly enough, when it first aired in 1975, it was literally the bottom-rated show of that week -- like, 108 out of 108 shows.
Aghast, pundits claimed it was "just too good for television." But I blame ABC, whose promo campaign made it look like some dry, drab snob-appeal kind of thing, instead of focusing on how funny it was.
I mean, even I didn't watch it the first time around. In fact, the shamefully low ratings made me search it out in reruns (I don't think ABC even reran it in prime time) and was very impressed. Eons later, I bought the VHS tape, then loaned it to my parents who loved it and watched it countless times over the years.
It did so badly in the Nielsens that I was surprised one of the networks hired Kate and Cukor to do another made-for-television movie four years later, a remake of THE CORN IS GREEN, which was also good.
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SUMMERTIME (1955) -- it plays into the American post-war fantasy about the adult Disneyland we wanted Europe to be. As well as any movie probably ever has:
Oh, David Lean, David Lean. Such a brilliant technical director. But I can never think of him without recalling that poor woman who tripped and fell, her legs dismembered by the wheels of the train, while shooting DOCTOR ZHIVAGO -- and he kept on filming.
Especially when I see Rossanna Brazzi at the end of SUMMERTIME.
Oh, David Lean, David Lean. Such a brilliant technical director. But I can never think of him without recalling that poor woman who tripped and fell, her legs dismembered by the wheels of the train, while shooting DOCTOR ZHIVAGO -- and he kept on filming.
Especially when I see Rossanna Brazzi at the end of SUMMERTIME.
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I've also seen SUMMERTIME. I believe it's still on my laptop. Hepburn plays a character named Jane Hudson, which always triggers my memory to Davis' Baby Jane from seven years later.
SUMMERTIME is a beautiful movie, and I remember finding it sweet. The ending left me a little sad, but satisfied.
SUMMERTIME is a beautiful movie, and I remember finding it sweet. The ending left me a little sad, but satisfied.
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Sadly Kate couldn't find any more good scripts for TV. I just watched Mrs Delafield... and it's just atrocious. It looks as if she was allowed to write her own lines because the rest is painful to watch. It even wastes fine actors like John Pleshette...Oddly enough, when it first aired in 1975, it was literally the bottom-rated show of that week -- like, 108 out of 108 shows.
Aghast, pundits claimed it was "just too good for television." But I blame ABC, whose promo campaign made it look like some dry, drab snob-appeal kind of thing, instead of focusing on how funny it was.
I mean, even I didn't watch it the first time around. In fact, the shamefully low ratings made me search it out in reruns (I don't think ABC even reran it in prime time) and was very impressed. Eons later, I bought the VHS tape, then loaned it to my parents who loved it and watched it countless times over the years.
It did so badly in the Nielsens that I was surprised one of the networks hired Kate and Cukor to do another made-for-television movie four years later, a remake of THE CORN IS GREEN, which was also good.
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@Snarky Oracle -- not a SUMMERTIME fan? 
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@Snarky Oracle -- not a SUMMERTIME fan?
When did I say that??
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Just picking about the "haha" response. But that was about the Baby Jane connection, wasn't it?
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That's what I was ha-ha-ing about: Hepburn's name in the movie.
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The Corn is Green I've seen. I think I was confusing it with the earlier one.
Seen that one, too.
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I watched SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER a couple of days ago. I haven't any connection with the source material -- I've never read the play and of course I've never seen it performed. I do know Hollywood sanitized it before filming it for the big screen.
I thought the movie was pretty good, and I had a specific liking to the B&W cinematography. I thought Katharine Hepburn was quite good as Violet, an aging Southern woman who has deceived herself into a rosy life that isn't true. Elizabeth Taylor does pretty well as Catherine, but she's probably miscast. I find her performance as Maggie the Cat more compelling -- although I know the consensus on that performance isn't terribly positive everywhere. Montgomery Clift is probably also miscast as Dr. Cukrowicz, with his manner not really aligning with the intelligent sophistication that character seems to command.
The sanitization the story received from stage to screen probably doesn't help the film, and it can make the story feel a little confusing and incomplete. The stigma that surrounds Sebastian is implied, but some people might miss the implication and be left unfulfilled at the end. But Hollywood in 1959 wasn't going to promote such an "alternative lifestyle" prominently on the screen.
SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER was a decent film, but I'm unsure if I'd watch it again. Overall, I wasn't terribly impressed, but I scratched the movie off my list.
I thought the movie was pretty good, and I had a specific liking to the B&W cinematography. I thought Katharine Hepburn was quite good as Violet, an aging Southern woman who has deceived herself into a rosy life that isn't true. Elizabeth Taylor does pretty well as Catherine, but she's probably miscast. I find her performance as Maggie the Cat more compelling -- although I know the consensus on that performance isn't terribly positive everywhere. Montgomery Clift is probably also miscast as Dr. Cukrowicz, with his manner not really aligning with the intelligent sophistication that character seems to command.
The sanitization the story received from stage to screen probably doesn't help the film, and it can make the story feel a little confusing and incomplete. The stigma that surrounds Sebastian is implied, but some people might miss the implication and be left unfulfilled at the end. But Hollywood in 1959 wasn't going to promote such an "alternative lifestyle" prominently on the screen.
SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER was a decent film, but I'm unsure if I'd watch it again. Overall, I wasn't terribly impressed, but I scratched the movie off my list.
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It's the closest Kate Hepburn would ever get to grand dame guignol -- and the closest she should ever get.
There are those who deride Hepburn's version of Violet, but I don't have a problem with it at all (unlike her turn in LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT a couple of years later, where she's both heart-stopping and cringey). She's just giving her obligatory, macabre Scorpio Rising diva delivery and as such it's on point.
Elizabeth Taylor gets a little shrillish in places with her long monologues, sometimes not fluctuating her pitch and intonation quite enough. But it's alright-ish. And in her 'regular' scenes, she's quite good.
Funny that Elizabeth with the violet eyes plays "Catherine" while Katharine plays "Violet."
The casting of Monty Clift was due to Taylor's demand, as he was fresh from that disfiguring car crash (just as she demanded that Roddy McDowall be horrendously mis-cast as Octavian Caeser in CLEOPATRA 'cause they were buds) and she wanted to give Clift a job... I want to see somebody like, maybe, Brando in the role of the doctor (just as I want someone like an Oliver Reed as Octavian).
The play is, of course, by Tennessee Williams and the script is by Gore Vidal. The requisite script sanitation of the time (like with STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE a few years earlier, when the changes in dialogue perplexed Vivien Leigh such that she asked, "'You disgust me because you're a poet' ???") doesn't really bother me, because it invites the audience to figure out what they're talking about -- which makes it more intriguing in a way: the love that dare not speak its name really can't be spoken!
The funereal tone of the era, five seconds before PSYCHO, also helps sell it. And Vidal's adaptation adds a few effectively Vidalian wisdoms mostly not in Tennessee's original play, addressing the predatory shallowness of relationships in general.
The rumor has circulated for decades that the crew of SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER had to explain to uptight, upright patrician Hepburn the very concept of homosexuality and she was supposedly aghast. (Ridiculous, of course. While divas do and must affect remote disapproval of anything that passes before them, Hepburn was well-aware of the lesbian gossip that circulated around her going back 25 years even then; she even came to suspect that her adored brother, the one she found hanging in the family barn when she was 14, may have in fact committed suicide over an unrequited love for "maybe a boy.")
Kate did sniff, however, that "I'm too healthy!" for these SLS characters and their sordid activities, to which Gore Vidal later sneered, "Hepburn had Parkinson's!" (although she obviously meant psychologically healthy). Then there was Joe Mankiewicz' on-set bullying of Taylor and Clift, both particularly vulnerable because of the recent death of Elizabeth's favorite-husband-to-date Mike Todd in a plane crash, and Monty's "basket-case" mental state in the wake of his automobile accident --- "and it wasn't constructive" Kate would say of the bullying; she asserted that once principal photography was over, she went to the editing booth and spat in Mankiewicz' eye. Mank later admitted the incident happened, but insisted she spat at his feet... So, given Kate's impulse for hyperbole and Mank's for minimalization, one assumes she struck him right in the crotch.
Oh, these battling Scorpio Risings.
Speaking of which, one wonders why Joe Mankiewicz, an often-inspired but sometimes a bit static (although that staticky-ness is not in evidence in SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER at all) director, one of the most brilliant screenwriters of all time (well, he was Scorpio Rising/Moon in Libra) didn't choose to write the script himself. But Gore Vidal was very hot at the time, and perhaps the gay thing "made sense" in hiring Gore for the screen-translation of Tennessee's stage play.
And, my-my, that long scene in the interior garden -- a giant terrarium -- just after Hepburn makes her descent in her home elevator, is damn near perfect, and the early peak of the movie. I always wanted to see stuff like that in the woefully misguided, and mis-cast, INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE a third of a century later.
Overall, I have few complaints about the 1959 version of SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER, Montgomery Clift's presence notwithstanding.
And mid-career Elizabeth Taylor has never been so stunning in black-&-white.
Even when the camera got so close you could see her lady-stache.
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That's what I thought, too, so I watched the 1993 made-for-TV remake assuming that it would be closer to the play and therefore more obvious but the climactic dialogue is just the same, resting heavily on the word "procure."
Now watch the trailer for the 1959 film. It seems clear that they expected the audience to already be familiar with the play and what it was about.
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I'll be the contrarian here: I really dislike SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER. The story is overheated nonsense and psychobabble twaddle, although it might be pure Camp since it's so self-serious and preposterous. It's a three actor movie and all three of them are bad. The very thought of Liz's shrillness in the movie sets my teeth on edge, and yet she's the best of the trio. I have no idea what Kate was doing; it's like someone trying to replicate a human being without ever having seen a human being. The critique (from whom?) that she was the world's best fake actress was never more true. And poor Monty just never regained his confidence after the accident. His performance is so hesitant it's almost apologetic.
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Well, it's hard to disagree with any of the specifics of that.
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Last night, I watched WITHOUT LOVE (1945), one of the lesser Tracy-Hepburn films. I think I've seen it before, but had no specific memory of it. Now I know why -- it's an unmemorable film. Tracy & Hepburn spend a good deal of the movie apart, reducing the film's screen magnetism. Also there's not much plot or humor. The movie only perks up when Lucille Ball and Keenan Wynn are on screen; they also made a great supporting pair in the even worse EASY TO WED (1946).
There' s a scene in the film where Hepburn had to veer from light comedy to heavy drama, and it encapsulated her weakness as an actress. When striving for Deep Feeling, she was superficial and theatrical. The best comic actress of her generation, yet she seemed incapable of mimicking normal human emotions like grief; maybe it was her snooty patrician upbringing or an inherent egotism.
There' s a scene in the film where Hepburn had to veer from light comedy to heavy drama, and it encapsulated her weakness as an actress. When striving for Deep Feeling, she was superficial and theatrical. The best comic actress of her generation, yet she seemed incapable of mimicking normal human emotions like grief; maybe it was her snooty patrician upbringing or an inherent egotism.
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Wonder how SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER would have been in color...
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Liz looked glorious in Technicolor, but the B&W cinematography is about the only thing about SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER that I like. It's not quite as stylishly evocative as STREETCAR, but at least it has more visual flair than CAT (a better film overall, but filmed as flat as a TV-movie).