Suddenly, Last Summer

I once sat in Fontainebleau State Park with a girl, encircled by the croaking bayou and its primordial oaks, and read aloud from The Call of Cthulhu. The sun sank into Lake Pontchartrain behind a veil of Spanish moss just as the Alert landed upon R'lyeh. The swamp haunts me. As the darkest corner of American folklore, the septic wound into which all the sins of middle America drain, it calls to the most savage aspects of our nature.

There is a grotesque garden, prehistoric and carnivorous, at the heart of Tennessee Williams' one-act. It is the godless world of predation inhabited by Sebastian (Williams' proxy), himself at odd times a sexual predator and a struggling, doomed insect. I learn that both Williams and Lovecraft published in Weird Tales during the twenties.

This play, so overgrown with visual metaphor, begs to be filmed. Joseph L. Mankiewicz directs with a gothic flair studied from Billy Wilder and the great films noir. The picture opens with the clinical unease of medical horror, suggesting gruesome things to come. Surrealism stalks around the edges, waiting to strike until the sudden brutal finale. It's very bleak. The director's elder brother, legendary screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, had died a horrible alcoholic's death six years earlier. You sense a despair behind JLM's affinity for this material.

Gore Vidal's screenplay does however pad out the story a bit too much (the movie's only major flaw). The surgeon played by Montgomery Clift is an unformed character, merely a witness to represent the audience. Nevertheless his presence in the role serves to create additional unease, because in the films Clift made after his crippling car accident he seems a person fractured through; given to stammering, pained staring and the tremors of withdrawal. His pain infects the viewer.

Katharine Hepburn does a fine version of Norma Desmond, minus the mothballed sexuality. (Hepburn always kinda scares me, with her masculine posture and seizing creepiness.) Thankfully we get Elizabeth Taylor as the standard Williams mad heroine. Liz is at her most sensuous in her first scene in the care of the nuns, before she gets cleaned up and put in her New Orleans society finery. When Clift first enters her stuffy confinement she's wearing a plain cotton dress, smoking and flush with warmth. No longer the coltish teen Clift coveted in A Place in the Sun, she here presents herself earthy with sex.

My favorite of Tennessee Williams' major works.