Smartorhypo Highly Overrated But Still Good

Phonearl Good start, but then it gets ruined

LouHomey From my favorite movies..

Spidersecu Don't Believe the Hype

daoldiges This film is occupied by a great cast and is full of interesting characters and performances. In particular I enjoyed Hepburn's Violet Venable, her eccentricities and open scenes in the garden, especially with the Venus Fly Trap. The story is a bit veiled to make palatable for the times but overall I think its still expressed affectively. Being based on a play it does feel a bit stagey at times. It also feels a bit melodramatic at times, but despite these shortcomings I found this film very interesting and entertaining. It's definitely not for everyone and I guess I could identify it as a guilty pleasure, but for those who are curious I think you should give it a try and judge for yourself.

Gil Costello Tennessee Williams is no doubt one of America's great playwrights, but one of his plays during our postmodern "enlightened" times of moral relativity (any morality that is relative is no morality at all) that is avoided like the plague is his masterpiece of confession: Suddenly, Last Summer. In his Memoirs he relates an anecdote about him and a gay friend in Italy picking up a child, whom, if memory serves me well, was delivering newspapers on a bike. They drive the child in their rented car outside the city to a desolate place. The child becomes terrified, and Williams and friend proceed to engage the child in sex. Williams tells this story light-heartedly, expecting us to find humor in the fact that there was no way he or his friend would ever really hurt the child. This reminded me of a time in 1968 when I was playing pinnacle with three persons, and one of them, someone I didn't know, was telling the story of how right after graduation from high school, a straight-A student, he joined the army and went to Vietnam. Then he told of how he was assigned to helicopter duty, and as they passed over rice paddies they played a gambling game, dropping grenades on men, women and children, making wagers on who would be the first to blow up a body. And he would laugh at moments for emphasis on the humor of it. I couldn't bring myself to laugh, and I felt bad because I knew this was his confession, and if we laughed it would be a form of forgiveness. This is what I believe Tennessee Williams was doing in his memoirs. But Williams was a great artist, and it was inevitable that he would have to come around to exploring "the horror the horror" of what he had been doing with children, and this occurred in Suddenly, Last Summer. The play and the less-than-perfect film adaptation, although an excellent film, is Williams' greatest work not only because it is his confession, and therefore his most personal work, but because he executes it with pure poetry-he is at the height of his power as an artist in writing it. Read any one of his plays, and then read Suddenly: nothing quite like it. This is a poem-play that needs to be explored if we ever decide to seriously explore hebephile ideology, which I don't expect to occur anytime soon. Maybe after the dissolution and death of our dying culture.

Kirpianuscus a film of actors. that defines this adaptation of Suddenly, last summer by Gore Vidal. perfect performances of Hepburn and Taylor, who seems crash Montgomery Clift, the inspired manner to build the tension, the images - skin for monologue, and, sure, the ambiguous manner to define homosexuality. a film who provokes at each new view. because it is precise, cold and fascinating. because the story has Tennessee Williams ' dramatic, but it breaks the circle of a simple adaptation. because it is a duel between two great actresses who, each, impose , in deep manner, her mark on the role. it is a great film for the opportunity of public to make a trip in himself's world. and that could not be a surprise . not only for the force of Elizabeth Taylor to translate the universe of play but for the art of Mankiewicz.

jarrodmcdonald-1 Elizabeth Taylor gives a fine performance in a story taken from one of Tennessee Williams' more contrived plays. Revised significantly for the Hollywood film, subplots and additional characters are added, and references to Sebastian being a homosexual are made less explicit. The cannibalism of Sebastian is still referenced, but of course, not directly shown. The story draws heavily from the author's own life, as his sister Rose had undergone a lobotomy in the 1930s; and Williams himself was gay. Williams had also begun psychoanalysis in the mid-to-late 1950s, and that is very much reflected in the scenes with Miss Taylor's character and her doctor, played by Montgomery Clift.