Suddenly, Last Summer

Superbly adapted with blistering performances from Taylor and Hepburn.

The main trouble with the picture is not its subject or its style, but its length.

The cast packs enough sexual ambiguity to satisfy the most rabid Williams fan (not to mention a screenplay by Gore Vidal), but Mankiewicz leaves much of the innuendo unexplored -- thankfully, perhaps.

It has some very effective moments, but on the whole it fails to move.

On film, with Taylor as the woman who saw something nasty and Clift as the psychiatrist trying to probe her trauma, the one-act material is stretched perilously thin; but it works for Hepburn as the incarnation of civilised depravity.

The main trouble with this picture is that an idea that is good for not much more than a blackout is stretched to exhausting length and, for all its fine cast and big direction, it is badly, pretentiously played.

Madness, homosexuality and cannibalism were just some of the ingredients that turned the picture into a cause celebre, with the end result alternating between stately serenity and outright hysteria.

[Mankiewicz] has turned out a polished film, and one that deals boldly with the ugly theme, but he has certainly not wasted any subtlety on the job.

This is the best film adaptation of Tennessee Williams' oeuvre. A prodigious work from Katharine Hepburn, Montgomery Clift, and Elizabeth Taylor. This is one of Joseph L. Mankiewicz's best films. [Full Review in Spanish]

It is hard to know what to say about this misguided tour through the dank recesses of Mr. Williams' subconscious. It's all clearly nonsense, the rankest kind of Victorian melodrama.