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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Snarky Oracle!" data-source="post: 370033" data-attributes="member: 57984">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.<img src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Qf2ieYaup_s/TxlubCB8nNI/AAAAAAAACHc/WQN3VyDqiH4/s1600/Liz+Taylor+Suddenly+Last+Summer+1959.JPG" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /></blockquote>

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