It’s fascinating to see the twisting and turning in this film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ play. In the 1950’s, American film was subject to government censorship under the notorious Hays Act, and to even more disgusting self-imposed censorship under the studios’ “voluntary code”. “It was like writing for Pravda,” said Gore Vidal, who scripted the film. In a wonderful documentary called The Celluloid Closet, he describes his repeated meetings with a Jesuit priest who, apparently, had life-and-death powers over any film production. Apparently, the very concept of homosexuality could not be allowed to appear on film. Since this was the central element of the plot, the result is a strange, almost hallucinatory atmosphere in which characters talk for ten minute stretches of oblique hints and enigmatic grimaces, merely to avoid mentioning that an absent character (who is dead) was gay! All this rigamarole is being done by Elizabeth Taylor during the period when she was a brilliant actress, Katherine Hepburn (who was always a brilliant actress), and Montgomery Clift. Clift was also a gifted actor, but at the time, he was recovering from a car accident that had disfigured his face, and was saturated with pain killers. He was also a closeted gay, himself. The scenes when all three of them are together are so filled with repression and tension that they count among the most bizarre and intense in film history. A viewer who is under twenty-five will probably find the whole thing incomprehensible. “What the hell are these people talking about, or more precisely, why are they not talking about it, what is everybody upset about it, and what on earth is going on?” was the response of one younger friend of mine. The whole thing was so alien to his experience and sensibilities that he could make no sense of it. And I couldn’t have explained it without undertaking a five hour discourse on the transformations in North American society in the lasty fifty years.
Tag Archives: Tennessee Williams
(Mankiewitz 1959) Suddenly, Last Summer
Posted by Phil Paine
on June 12, 2018
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