Portrait of Madonna the Tennessee Williams Annual Review
Camp Cannibalism in All of a sudden Last Summer
Tison Pugh
Veering wildly between searing realism and torrid grotesquerie, Tennessee Williams's All of a sudden Terminal Summertime (1958) ends with the horror of cannibalism and, virtually inevitably ensuing, the damnation of critics. Contemporary reviewers such as Anthony West decried the play'due south "grotesque and humorless enormity" (211), Tom Driver denigrated information technology as "stupor material" (166), and Brooks Atkinson, in his New York Times review, concluded that "What Mr. Williams has to say is in essence repugnant"—although he softened this sentiment past noting that Williams "says it with awareness, sentience, musical grace and conviction" (165). More than xl years after the play's debut, Alan Sinfield witheringly dismissed information technology every bit "Williams' well-nigh homophobic play" (192), and Michael Paller has more recently compared information technology to Shakespeare'due south anti-Semitic The Merchant of Venice, recognizing both as problematic plays that problem modern audiences' appreciation of their authors' genius (145–46).
Unsurprisingly, the play's 1959 cinematic adaptation—directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, with a screenplay by Williams and Gore Vidal—generated a firestorm of controversy even prior to its release. Moira Walsh documents that the film was "originally denied a seal by the Product Lawmaking Administration," noting likewise that, when eventually approving its release, the Code Assistants's Review Board only overlooked its "provision forbidding the screen treatment of 'sexual activity perversion or any inference of it'" (428–29).1 In a statement of moral distaste, the National Legion of Decency labeled it equally "inappropriate for exhibition to general audiences" ("Legion Labels Film"). Upon the film's release, reviewers were nigh unanimous in their scathing reactions. Writing for the Observer, C. A. Lejeune fulminated, "I loathe this moving-picture show. I say so candidly. To my mind it is a decadent slice of work, sensational, roughshod, and ridiculous," and ane tin can hear John McCarten'due south sheer exasperation in the New Yorker: "the picture is a preposterous and monotonous potpourri of incest, homosexuality, psychiatry, and, so help me, cannibalism" (75). Even critics who admired the film'south technical artistry deplored its storyline, as is evident in Arthur Knight'due south conclusion: "It is, in brusk, a wholly beauteous rendering into film of a work that is at once fascinating and nauseating, brilliant and immoral." To argue against these reviews would in many ways amount to picayune more a fatuous gesture: Lejeune's adjectives—"sensational, savage, and ridiculous"—accurately capture the narrative's excesses, just, as I hope to show, critics such as Lejeune also, if inadvertently, captured in their litany of horrors its lasting appeal.
For All of a sudden Last Summer revels in backlog, and by appreciating rather than denigrating this quality, one tin enjoy the movie for its mercurial even so submerged camp sense of humour. Moe Meyer's succinct definition of army camp as "the full body of performative practices and strategies used to enact a queer identity, with enactment defined as the production of social visibility" (5), captures the paradox of the film's outré style, for it produces a vision of queer identity in its margins while simultaneously refusing to depict homosexuality. Viewers hardly see Williams's enigmatic Sebastian Venable—except in flashbacks while shot from behind—because he has been consumed prior to the narrative's beginning, even so his queer (un)presence campily subverts the flick'south halfhearted flirtations with realism.2 In looking through All of a sudden Last Summer'southward reception history, it becomes apparent as well that some critics realized, fifty-fifty if they did not approve of, this corrupt comic ethos. The New Republic's Stanley Kauffmann states that Williams "has created an exercise in Grand Guignol" and so extends this critique: "To get in worse, he has plunged with such blind fervor that he has non composed a skillful Guignol" (20). William Whitebait, in a caustic New Statesman review, nonetheless hints at All of a sudden Final Summer'due south hidden appeal—"If we wanted a parody of Tennessee Williams, where should nosotros become simply to Tennessee Williams?"—and Isabel Quigly similarly declares that the film is "not admirable or deplorable, merely cool. The sort of jeu d'camaraderie someone might think up for a literary competition, a story in the manner of Tennessee Williams" (736).
In this lite both the play and its adaptation offer themselves to army camp interpretations that prize their ostensible failures, for numerous viewers take found reason to express joy heartily at this decadent story: Violet Venable (Katharine Hepburn) desperately seeks to maintain her sense of southern award past bribing the honorable lobotomist Dr. Cukrowicz (Montgomery Clift) to purge her niece, Catharine Holly (Elizabeth Taylor), of memories of her son Sebastian'southward gruesome demise. Indeed, in documenting the humor that some audience members enjoyed during its screening, Whitebait skitters near an alternative interpretation: "The plot is so absurd that one couldn't seriously prepare information technology downward on paper. Even a publicity-stunned audience stirred at times to laughter." On a like note, Gore Vidal recorded his belief that Williams had transgressed the limits of theatrical and cinematic decorum, declaring that "Tennessee Williams is the best of American playwrights, but he has gone overboard" ("Vidal"). He later, in his 1995 memoir, also documented the pleasure found by some audiences in this ostensible travesty: "I should note that whenever Suddenly, Concluding Summer appears on Italian tv set, the local boys find information technology irresistibly funny" (Palimpsest 152). Horrifically demented for many, Suddenly Last Summer is humorously demented for many others, and the adaptation's camp sensibility—evident in its exaggerated symbolism, lurid storyline, and uneven performances—illuminates the possibility of finding treasure in a cultural artifact dismissed as trash by then many of its contemporary reviewers.
Williams, Vidal, and Army camp Symbolism
Camp ofttimes springs along in an audience'southward interpretation of a given work, non necessarily every bit a result of the creative vision of its creator(s). Even so as mid-twentieth-century gay men, Williams and Vidal were widely exposed to army camp and camp humor.3 Military camp percolated throughout midcentury American and European queer subcultures, notably documented in such texts as Christopher Isherwood'south novel The Earth in the Evening (1954) and Susan Sontag's landmark essay "Notes on 'Military camp'" (1964). Williams and Vidal had known each other personally and professionally for over a decade by the time of their collaboration on Suddenly Last Summer, and for the almost part their friendship ran smoothly (in contrast to Williams's on-again, off-again acquaintanceship with Truman Capote, with whom Vidal feuded publicly for decades). To a notable degree they appreciated each other'south sense of sense of humour. In letters to Donald Windham penned in 1948, Williams praised Vidal's good looks—"Gore is a beauty" (qtd. in Windham 211)—while also acknowledging his endearingly madcap mannerisms: "He is such a lunatic that anything he says is partly discountable. I liked him but only through the strenuous effort it took to overlook his conceit" (216). Williams also enjoyed Vidal every bit a kindly misanthrope, as recorded in a letter of the alphabet to Windham the following year: "I miss him, for it is comforting to know somebody who gets along worse with people than I do, and I however believe that he has a heart of aureate" (255). Equally the years passed and their friendship deepened, Williams's assessments of Vidal'south writing, initially disparaging, improved notably. In a 1948 letter of the alphabet to Carson McCullers, he dismissed Vidal'south The City and the Pillar: "I have merely read [information technology] and while it is not a good volume it is absorbing. There is not a really distinguished line in the book and yet a groovy deal of it has a curiously life-similar quality. The end is trashy, alas, murder and suicide both" (171). Moving from this unfavorable appraisal of Vidal's manner and plotting, he subsequently wrote, in a 1952 letter of the alphabet to Oliver Evans, "I am impressed by Gore'southward new book [The Judgment of Paris]. [. . .] I am deeply impressed by the cogency of the writing and the liquid smooth way" (421).
From this friendship and a common admiration of each other's literary talents grew their collaboration on Suddenly Terminal Summer, with Williams receiving co-credit for the screenplay, although they both, on numerous occasions, admitted that Vidal undertook the lion's share of the writing. As Vidal recalls, Williams and producer Sam Spiegel expressed loftier ambitions for the creative and commercial success of Of a sudden Last Summer'southward cinematic accommodation:
In 1958 I went down to Miami to run into Tennessee and the film producer Sam Spiegel. Would I write the screenplay for All of a sudden, Last Summer? The Bird [Vidal's nickname for Williams] was manic that flavour and Sam more than usually devious. I agreed to write the script if Tennessee would have no manus in it. After, Sam would talk him into taking co-credit for my screenplay on the basis, "Babe, it volition win the Academy Accolade." As the Bird was ravenous for prizes, he put his name alongside mine on the script. Happily, the reviews were so bad that he immediately regretted what he had done; afterwards, he was less disturbed as the press proved to be and so bad that the public was driven to see what The New York Times shrieked was a commemoration of sodomy, incest, cannibalism, and Elizabeth Taylor at her most voluptuous. (Palimpsest 335)
Williams conceded that "the screenplay was mostly written by our wonderful new playwright, Gore Vidal," as he further affirmed his preference for his drama: "Of class I prefer the play, naturally" ("Interview" [Murrow] lxx). Williams and Vidal's collaboration, and so, was largely one in proper noun merely, yet it is nonetheless clear that Williams believed Vidal capable of successfully transmuting his play into movie theatre—if not that the consequence would (d)evolve into a camp classic.
Central to a camp reading of Suddenly Terminal Summer is the fact that Williams moved from the wrenching emotional drama of A Streetcar Named Want (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin can Roof (1955) to a play only tenuously anchored in any sense of realism. He stated that Suddenly Concluding Summertime is "non a realistic play," labeling it instead a "moral legend of our times" ("Williams on a Hot Tin Roof" 52) and praising it, in a 1961 interview with Studs Terkel, every bit "perhaps the most poetic" of his works ("Studs Terkel" 86). Farther along these lines, Williams argued that realism frequently hampers an artist's vision of truth:
Sometimes the truth is more than accessible when you ignore realism, considering when you see things in a somewhat exaggerated form you capture more of the truthful essence of life. The exaggeration gets closer to the essence. This essence of life is really very grotesque and gothic. To get to it you've got to practise what may strike some people as baloney. ("Interview" [Chocolate-brown] 264)
Certainly, one can read Of a sudden Last Summer from a realist perspective, as its events all fall within the realm of, if non the plausible, the however possible, and fundamental elements of Williams'southward life—his overbearing mother, his psychologically troubled sister, and even his sex activity life—invest autobiographical elements into its storyline. As John Lahr observes in his magisterial account of Williams's life, "Suddenly Final Summertime was a sort of autobiographical exorcism that worked through Williams's grief and guilt over his sis, Rose, as well as his acrimony at Edwina for deciding to allow a bilateral prefrontal lobotomy to be performed on her without informing him in advance about the process—an omission for which Williams never forgave his mother" (357). Furthermore, Sebastian's use of his European travels as an opportunity to sate his rapacious sexual appetite mirror Williams's own journeys. Albert Devlin and Nancy Tischler note that Williams "used 'Cabeza de Lobo' equally fictional shield for the Barcelona scenes in Suddenly Last Summer" (13n), and Williams, in a letter of the alphabet to Donald Windham, voices sentiments he later ascribes to Sebastian: "We were both getting an ambition for blonds as the Roman gentry are all sort of dusky types" (qtd. in Windham 215), a line echoed in Catharine's cry, "Nosotros were going to blonds next. Blonds were next on the carte. All side by side summertime, Sebastian was famished for blonds. Fed up with the night ones."4 Just simply because the play and movie contain realist edges and hints of Williams'south autobiography does not necessitate that they exist assessed against the criteria of psychological realism, and this disjunction betwixt critical expectations and grotesque backlog has dogged their disquisitional history.
Williams insisted his narrative should exist read symbolically, stating that "[Sebastian] is completely enslaved by his baser nature and this is what destroys him. His death is a ritualistic expiry, symbolic. And when he fails, when he is unable to write his poem that summer, so he is completely lost" ("Meeting" 210). Ironically, in a 1960 interview with Edward R. Murrow, Williams criticized cinematic adaptations that hew besides closely to their source: "I think they should create something entirely new in a cinematic grade, you meet. [. . .] Merely they stick too close to the stage play and a phase play is not ever effective on the screen, y'all know" ("Intervew" [Murrow] 71). Then, in a double irony, he faulted the accommodation of Suddenly Last Summer for failing to adhere to his symbolism, stating that "Sebastian's decease is treated realistically on the screen, which was deplorable. Actually, cannibalism was simply a dramatic metaphor. It'southward never been accepted as such considering people accept seen the moving-picture show and not the play" ("Tennessee Williams" 287). Here Williams locates the film's failure in its ostensibly realist depiction of his symbolism, nevertheless Mankiewicz stages this climactic scene not with the boys literally devouring Sebastian but with Sebastian being pulled down by them every bit his hand reaches out to escape. It is indeed a metaphoric staging of Williams's fundamental symbol, simply one in which this symbolism cannot hibernate the outré possibility of cannibalism that Williams seeks to camouflage. In many instances a camp sensibility cannot be purged from a storyline and so drenched in excess, as this telling controversy about the staging of cannibalism makes clear. Williams may have focused his critique on the fact that the cinematic adaptation of Of a sudden Final Summertime turns cannibalism-equally-symbol into cannibalism-every bit-act, yet numerous other camp elements, many of which appear in the play as well, return the narrative queerly amusing and apt for sense of humor.
Camp Cinema
Suddenly Last Summer begins with a lobotomy, and thus it begins humorously. Some readers might vehemently disagree with this pat statement, and I offer it not as a definitive business relationship of one's viewing of the film only as a potential interpretation aligned with the narrative'due south dark and campy comedy. Inside much of popular culture, lobotomies are simply beaucoup trop—non just surgery only brain surgery, non merely a rehabilitative treatment for an sick patient but for a mentally deranged ane. Certainly, lobotomies were a subject of great seriousness for Williams, given his sister Rose'south psychiatric problems, yet in the wider cultural imagination they ofttimes foster humorous responses, such as in a (likely apocryphal) quip attributed to Dorothy Parker ("I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy") and in the stock figure of mad lobotomists who appear in horror films (a tradition that Williams's Dr. Cukrowicz helps inaugurate).5 Some might decry the concept of brain surgery serving as the foundation for one-act, yet reimagining horror as humor is common within a camp sensibility. Catharine'south frantic cry to Dr. Cukrowicz—"Where will you cut my brain, doctor?"—tin can be interpreted both as the film's dramatic apex and equally the campy failure of its drama to cohere within the expected paradigms of realism.
Certainly, the marketing of Of a sudden Concluding Summer sought to capitalize on its risqué storyline of lobotomies and cannibalism, giving titillating hints well-nigh its content that nod to its camp potential. In the trailer, text splashes across the screen, stating, "Suddenly You are Face to Face with a New Emotional Pinnacle in Moving picture Making!" and declaring besides that the pic is based on "The World's About Provocative Play."6 The trailer's narrator tantalizingly acknowledges the moving-picture show's taboo subject matter: "This generation's great writer and poet, author of A Streetcar Named Want and True cat on a Hot Tin Roof, unashamedly writes of a woman's strong wants and a man'due south foreign needs." The adverb "unashamedly" tacitly implies that perhaps Williams should indeed exist ashamed of his shocking narrative, with the telling allusion to a "human'southward foreign needs" hinting at his (and Sebastian'south) homosexuality. Once more, Meyer's declaration that camp humor makes queer identities visible is relevant, for the trailer acknowledges the movie'southward queer heritage while at the same time disavowing it.
The motion-picture show'southward opening scenes at King of beasts's View asylum feature madness on display—a knitting woman scares off an older woman in a rocking chair, while another adult female fetishistically holds up a doll. Dr. Cukrowicz soon lobotomizes this latter inmate. A foreshadowing of Mrs. Venable's nefarious programme for Catharine, this operation illustrates Dr. Cukrowicz'southward dedication to curing the mentally sick, however Catharine is not insane and thus never in need of a lobotomy. As the conclusion makes clear, a unmarried session of Freud's talking cure, administered through the magic of a truth serum, suffices to heal her psychic scars. The threat of her lobotomy even so escalates the film's emotionalism to a fevered, overwrought pitch, such as when she learns her brother, George, and mother take agreed to Mrs. Venable'south extortion:
GEORGE: But, Cathie, the way Aunt Half-dozen put it, there was no choice at all. Mama'southward got to sign.
MRS. HOLLY: Besides, honey, information technology'south not like it was for always. In fact, they say in no time subsequently the little functioning you lot'll exist able to . . .
CATHARINE: What "lilliputian operation"?
MRS. HOLLY: Oh, Cathie! Oh, Cathie!
CATHARINE: In that location'due south merely 1 "picayune functioning" they perform here! Information technology's on the brain! It's called a lobotomy! You lot may accept heard of it, or read nearly it. I have. Information technology's that prissy, immature doctor's specialty! In cases of hopeless lunacy—he bores holes into the skull and operates on the brain!
MRS. HOLLY: Oh, honey, delight don't talk about it. Please!
In the ensuing family storm, George adds unconvincingly, "They say it don't hurt at all . . . No worse than having your tonsils out." Mrs. Holly's and George's paper-thin loyalty to Catharine wavers at the promise of cash, with Catharine's outburst prompting Mrs. Holly, in a virtual parody of the self-martyring mother, to cast herself as the victim ("[P]lease don't talk about information technology. Please!"). Moreover, in comparing a lobotomy to a tonsillectomy, George diminishes Catharine's suffering and proves the expendability of her brain to his pecuniary desires. An over-the-top presentation of venality, Vidal'south delineation of the Holly association teeters near the edge of humor, and for many viewers totters over.
Violet Venable's dark obsession to preserve Sebastian's reputation confronting aspersions concerning his homosexuality—truthful though they may exist—overshadows other aspects of her character, yet her shallow vanity paints her equally deserving of viewers' laughter. Her secretary, Miss Foxhill, primly and ridiculously chastises Dr. Cukrowicz for arriving early on to his appointment—"You are twenty-three seconds early. Sit down down, please"—and with these words prepares viewers for an exaggerated vision of southern propriety. Descending in her baroque lift to meet her guest, Mrs. Venable plays her patrician charm as a facade, yet the facade cannot hide the frailties underneath, both maternal and dotty. Every bit she meets Dr. Cukrowicz, she asks, in response to his stare, "Am I only wearing one earring? Accept I forgotten my lip rouge?" suggesting that she is in denial about having lost her youthful attractiveness. Furthermore, her erotic interest in the young, alluring Dr. Cukrowicz is evident: "I must say, yous're much handsomer than your photograph in the paper, without that awful paraphernalia you doctors wear." In this scene, Mrs. Venable aligns with other aging belles in Williams'south piece of work who invite camp stagings, such as Miss Collins in Portrait of a Madonna, a connection further heightened past the fact that Mrs. Venable in the film, like Miss Collins in the play, is last seen succumbing to madness. Miss Collins skirts tragic and comic valences in the loneliness of her life and in her refusal to have her fading looks, which Williams stages for a grotesquely comic outcome: "Self-consciously she touches her ridiculous corkscrew curls with the faded pink ribbon tied through them. Her manner becomes that of a slightly coquettish but prim little Southern belle" (114). A flirting youngster in the body of an aged woman, Miss Collins subverts the foundational prototype of southern women's sexual allure. Forth similar lines, Mrs. Venable's queries about her earring and lip rouge precede her statement "I'm in mourning," suggesting that she privileges her vanity over her devotion to her son'south memory.
More than only an aging debutante, Mrs. Venable adheres to the archetypal role of army camp femininity—the bitch—evident in her scathing assessment of her niece. Dr. Cukrowicz warns her, "You must realize the functioning I do is only for the unapproachable, for the hopeless," to which she callously replies, "If she isn't unapproachable and hopeless, I don't know who is"—a line that elicits laughter, fifty-fifty if unintentional. Seemingly showing concern for Catharine, she observes, "She's mad as a hatter, poor child," only then glibly redirects the chat to her true interest ("Would y'all similar to meet Sebastian's studio? It's at the end of the jungle"), thus disproving the tender concern she sought to portray and reminding viewers of the excessive setting in which the action unfolds, a tropical jungle transported into a New Orleans dwelling house. In some other line with humour humming underneath its surface, she bitterly declares of Sebastian'due south relationship with Catharine, "How he must have loathed being touched by her," which reveals more than of her blistering, dyspeptic graphic symbol. The bitch figure rewrites the traditionally gendered scripts of femininity, with her callousness and brazen way often evoking laughter both despite and due to her precipitous tongue.
Military camp humor flourishes in melodrama as well, peculiarly when an ostensibly realist portrayal of heightened emotions reaches beyond its expected registers. When Dr. Hockstader, the hospital administrator, proclaims of Dr. Cukrowicz's program, "This is very unorthodox," Dr. Cukrowicz replies, "So is insanity. That's why nosotros're hither." Montgomery Clift's delivery of his lines cements his graphic symbol's earnestness, if besides his exaggerated naïveté. For all of Dr. Cukrowicz's highly-seasoned characteristics in his role as the concerned physician, his unflappable at-home merges disjointedly with his insistent innocence: "What would attraction have to exercise with a son and a mother?" he obliviously wonders, bullheaded to the blatant psychosexual dynamics unfolding before him. In a camp reading of Suddenly Final Summer, it is one of the moving picture'south funniest lines, for the expert in the workings of the man mind cannot decipher what is apparent to all.
Just most ridiculous in All of a sudden Last Summer'due south transition from play to film is the introduction of romance into a storyline of lobotomies and southern sexual secrets. Catharine continually flirts with Dr. Cukrowicz, such as when she pretends that she volition sexually assault him (merely and so redirects her attention to his cigarettes). As their beginning session together winds down later on she initially confronts the traumatic memory of Sebastian's demise, she kisses the doc, but he merely brushes it off equally a "friendly kiss"—a bizarrely inappropriate response for a medical professional, particularly as Catharine presently admits, "Possibly information technology wasn't." Certainly, she is concerned most her appearance: "I want yous to know that I can look bonny, if I had my hair done and if . . . When I'm at King of beasts'south View, may I article of clothing a pretty dress?" Their romance deepens as they prepare for her to divulge the truth of Sebastian's decease. Dr. Cukrowicz asks her not to resist him and to tell him the complete story, and she agrees equally they squeeze hands—"Hither are my easily. But there'southward no resistance in them." They soon osculation as she cries, "Hold me. I've been so alone." In the moving picture's conclusion Catharine is cured: "Miss Catharine'south here," she proclaims as she walks away with him in a symbolic staging of their budding love. By merging Williams'south darkly symbolic play with a romance, Vidal upends expectations based on genre and source text, resulting in a disjointed film humorous in its unexpected courting scenes.
Camp Casting
In casting Hepburn, Taylor, and Clift in the accommodation's atomic number 82 roles, Spiegel generated fizz for Suddenly Terminal Summer through their combined star power, and these actors, overwhelmingly admired for their distinguished careers, mostly escaped censure for their performances.7 With sentiments representative of the critical consensus, Peter Bakery praised the threesome in Films and Filming, suggesting that they "combine to requite ane of the near perfectly counterbalanced pieces of teamwork we have seen in the movie house for many years" (21). Both Hepburn and Taylor received University Award nominations for All-time Extra—although Simone Signoret won for Jack Clayton'south Room at the Summit—with Hepburn's imperious, cruel, and ultimately vulnerable realization of Violet Venable receiving particular praise. Albert Johnson raved of Hepburn that she is "absolutely magnificent. She creates a completely villainous, hawklike creature of [. . .] elegant abstrusity and arrayal" (41). Taylor besides received plaudits, such as Arthur Knight'south cess that "hers is unquestionably one of the finest performances of this or any year."
At the same time, casting decisions are notoriously subjective and routinely generate controversy, and Williams admitted his doubts about Spiegel's choices:
When Sam Spiegel bought Suddenly Concluding Summer, we agreed on the casting. At first, I wasn't certain about Katharine Hepburn as Violet Venable. I thought she was quite too young to play such an older woman, every bit I visualized the office. In the phase product, Hortense Alden played the part in a wheelchair. Only I admitted that casting Miss Hepburn might be daring, and it took me a while to get accepted to the idea. At present, of form, I know she was brilliant. So was honey Monty Clift as Dr. Cukrowicz. But while Elizabeth Taylor was very good equally Maggie in True cat on a Hot Can Roof, she simply wasn't right equally Catherine Holly in Suddenly Last Summer. ("New Tennessee" 154)
Given the legendary status in Hollywood history enjoyed past Hepburn and Taylor, it is no like shooting fish in a barrel task to join Williams in questioning their performances, withal I observe them curiously off, both Hepburn'south restrained demeanor and Taylor's excessive emotionality. The reviewer for Time, while conceding that Hepburn "does an intelligent job portraying the devouring female parent," suggests amusingly that she is "dolled up like a cantankerous between Auntie Mame and the White Queen" ("New Pictures" 66)—a drolly apropos assessment of the decadence repressed under her outside of southern manners. Bosley Crowther similarly snipes: "Katharine Hepburn plays the arch and blusterous dowager with what looks like a stork's nest on her head and such bony and bumptious posturing that she acts a Mary Piddling caricature." Vidal mentions that Bette Davis was his showtime choice to play Violet Venable (Palimpsest 319), and in the low-cal of Davis'due south gleefully demented roles in subsequent years—What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (dir. Robert Aldrich, 1962) and Hush . . . Hush, Sweetness Charlotte (dir. Robert Aldrich, 1964)—it is easy to imagine an even campier version of All of a sudden Concluding Summer, one in which Hepburn'south restrained patrician facade gives way to Davis's raw passion of a woman on the edge of sanity.
In a similar vein, the Time critic berated Taylor'southward performance: "Extra Taylor's inability to reproduce a recognizable emotion becomes about an advantage in a role that contains no recognizable emotions" ("New Pictures" 66). The paradox of Taylor'due south performance is that she must play, equally this reviewer points out, unrecognizable emotions, for what performance can fairly capture the horror of witnessing one'due south cousin devoured past child cannibals? Taylor's delivery of central lines—such as "He was lying naked on these broken stones. And this you won't believe. Nobody, nobody, could believe it. Information technology looked as if . . . as if they had devoured him!"—range within the probable registers of human expression, but the ludicrousness of the storyline, coupled with her dire situation, almost of necessity conflict. Another scenario that registers either Taylor's brilliance or her incompetence arises when she defends herself against aspersions impugning her sexual morality: "Y'all see, I'k classified as tearing, which means I'thousand apt to attack you physically and and so accuse you lot of rape. . . . I molested an elderly gardener of smashing virtue." A corrupt comedy of manners in such moments equally this, Of a sudden Final Summer appropriates Wildean wit for a narrative on the edge of the macabre, mixing radical tenors of expression and emotion in means that cannot exist contained by its overarching dramatic form.
One of the odder lapses in both Hepburn'southward and Taylor'southward performances arises in the fact that they play southern women who just speak with southern accents when insulting or imitating other southerners, thus oddly undermining the coherency of their portrayals. In her simmering distaste for her nephew, George, Mrs. Venable archly states, "I said take the clothes, George. Don't flaunt them in my face." She then shifts into a cornpone dialect and continues, "Why don't you both kindly let yourselves out?" and and then returns to her normal timbre: "Get the rest of the dress another time." Similarly, Catharine impersonates Sebastian's southern accent while speaking to Dr. Cukrowicz: "Mr. Venable was a good homo, simply dull to the point of genius," she says, and so continues in her usual tone, "That was Sebastian you just heard talking." Notably, Mrs. Venable uses her exaggerated southern emphasis to insult despised George, whereas Catharine mimics esteemed Sebastian; these varying southern accents, then, are non so much markers of the characters' social classes but of the actors' regional roots, which Hepburn and Taylor practice not modulate for their roles. Camp oft emerges in failed performances, and Hepburn's and Taylor's unsteady play with dialect imbues Suddenly Last Summer with an ironic distance between the actors and their characters.
With Hepburn'southward and Taylor's performances receiving outsized attention, many reviews just overlook Clift, yet the emotional range of his Dr. Cukrowicz is strangely stilted and off-balance. Kauffmann observes that "Montgomery Clift, as the young dr., is present a good deal of the time, but his contribution is small-scale" and and so derides him as "a husk that in one case contained a modest kernel" (20). Albert Johnson describes him simply as "extra-numb in [a] numb role" (41), and Henry Hart gripes that he "is completely impossible" (41). Clift'due south 1956 car accident is often seen as a turning point in his career, every bit he increasingly turned to drugs and booze to mute its balance pain, and his performance in Suddenly Terminal Summer suffers from an eerie lack of affect. Yet this stiff performance, every bit suggested previously, imbues the film with an edge of laughter, for Dr. Cukrowicz is simply too slow to grasp the grotesque twists of familial desire surrounding him. A camp sensibility often embraces the performative and narrative lapses that arise when a production fails to reach the rarefied emotional heights to which it aspires, and Hepburn, Taylor, and Clift collectively contribute to Suddenly Terminal Summer's downfall in this regard, thus also contributing to its apotheosis equally a military camp classic.
A Army camp Conclusion
In the twelvemonth of its release, Williams endorsed Suddenly Last Summertime enthusiastically, praising Spiegel for his efforts and predicting their longstanding alliance: "This picture filled out on the screen. The first two-thirds had more dimension than the play had. Sam Spiegel [. . .] is one of the greatest producers in movies today. If there were faults, they weren't his. I desire him to practice all my plays in the movies from now on. Sam and Gore Vidal plotted the play structure and did a fabulous task" (qtd. in Hyams). In after years, however, he spoke more openly about his distaste for information technology, as in a 1974 interview with Cecil Brown: "Information technology horrified me, the film; Sam Spiegel fabricated the mistake of inviting me to a private screening of it in his flat and I walked out in the centre of it. I was so offended by the literal approach because the play was metaphorical; it was a sort of poem, I idea—I loved Katharine Hepburn in information technology but I didn't like the film, to exist honest" ("Interview" [Brown] 274). Also, Williams recalls that, in his deal with Spiegel, he requested fifty grand dollars and twenty per centum of the profits; Spiegel agreed, merely Williams regretted ironically, "the profits were as good as the motion-picture show was bad.—that figures" (Memoirs 176).
But even if one agrees with Williams that the film of Suddenly Last Summertime is bad, it is ane of the more enjoyably bad films I have ever watched. Its flaws—stylized and overdetermined acting, a ludicrous and lurid plotline, family ties predicated on the roles of bitchy dowager and traumatized innocent—are its about compelling features, ones that dazzle with their sheer outrageousness. In describing the lush gear up he created every bit Sebastian's garden, designer Oliver Messel admitted that many of the flowers were fakes only tellingly suggested, "The bogus might do fifty-fifty amend than the existent" (qtd. in Alpert 8). Indeed, sometimes the artificial is meliorate than the real, the failures more interesting than the successes. Every bit Cukrowicz'south colleague Dr. Hockstader concludes of Catharine's disturbing tale, "There'southward every possibility that the daughter's story could be true," and from a military camp perspective that prizes artificiality over 18-carat emotion, one should consider the very real possibility that the picture show is a black comic masterpiece—one unrealized past its creators and unappreciated past most critics. And in this light even some critics give the film's fans ample opportunity to laugh, such as in Peter Baker's unintentionally hilarious declaration: "If Mr. Williams chooses to be sensational nearly homosexuality (and heavens knows, it'south as old every bit Human himself), then at least he should find out more about his subject" (21). Truly, Mr. Williams knew a affair or ii nearly homosexuality, as even the nearly brief examinations of his biography would divulge, simply perhaps Mr. Baker—and Mr. Williams, too—should have learned a thing or two about campsite humor before decrying the ostensible horror of All of a sudden Last Summer.
Notes
one For more on All of a sudden Concluding Summer'southward code violations, encounter Palmer and Bray 152–57. They quote Lawmaking enforcer Geoffrey Shurlock, who complained, "We also felt that the ending—cannibalism with its sexual overtones—was so revolting, that nosotros did not feel justified in giving the Code seal" (154). Here and throughout, this essay uses the play'south treatment of the title, i.e., Of a sudden Last Summer, instead of All of a sudden, Last Summertime (as in the picture show and some other sources). When the title appears in a direct quotation, original punctuation has been retained. The playscript also serves as the default for the spelling of character names and locations.
ii For a study of the significance of Sebastian'due south absenteeism, see Sofer.
3 For assay of Tennessee Williams and camp, see Free and Pugh ("Camp Sadomasochism in Tennessee Williams's Plays," a chapter from Precious Perversions, treats this subject area).
four Quotations are taken from the film All of a sudden Last Summer. Vidal borrowed many lines direct from the playscript.
five Jenell Johnson calls lobotomists "a familiar monster in the American imagination"(153) and traces their pop-culture portrayals to Suddenly Last Summer.
6 This trailer is available on the film'southward DVD; see All of a sudden Concluding Summer.
7 Montgomery Clift's function, Dr. Cukrowicz, was initially offered to William Holden; see Pryors. Vidal reports that Elizabeth Taylor insisted on Clift for the part (Palimpsest 399).
Works Cited
Alpert, Hollis. "In a Messel Garden." Films and Filming Jan. 1960: 8+.
Atkinson, Brooks. "Garden District: Short Plays by Tennessee Williams Put On in an Off-Broadway House." Crandell 163–65.
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Crandell, George, ed. The Critical Response to Tennessee Williams. Westport: Greenwood, 1996.
Crowther, Bosley. "Suddenly Terminal Summer: Movie from Williams Play at Two Houses." Rev. of All of a sudden Terminal Summer. New York Times 23 Dec. 1959: 22.
Devlin, Albert J., ed. Conversations with Tennessee Williams. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1986.
Devlin, Albert J., and Nancy M. Tischler, eds. The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams: Book Ii: 1945–1957. New York: New Directions, 2004.
Commuter, Tom F. "Accelerando." Crandell 165–67.
Free, William. "Camp Elements in the Plays of Tennessee Williams." Southern Quarterly 21.2 (1983): 16–23.
Hart, Henry. "Picture show Reviews: Suddenly Last Summertime." Films in Review Jan. 1960: 39–41.
Hyams, Joe. "Tennessee Williams Turns Critic." New York Herald Tribune 23 Dec. 1959: xiii.
Johnson, Albert. "Review: Suddenly Last Summertime." Moving-picture show Quarterly 13.3 (1960): twoscore–42.
Johnson, Jenell. American Lobotomy: A Rhetorical History. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2014.
Kauffmann, Stanley. "Arty Horror, Straight Suspense." Rev. of Suddenly Last Summer. New Republic 18 Jan. 1960: 20–21.
Knight, Arthur. "SR Goes to the Movies: Eating People Is Wrong." Rev. of Of a sudden Last Summertime. Saturday Review 2 January. 1960: 31.
Lahr, John. Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Mankind. New York: Norton, 2014.
"Legion Labels Film: Suddenly Last Summer Is 'Separately Classified.'" New York Times iv Dec. 1959: 36.
Lejeune, C. A. "Deep in the Heart of Tennessee." Rev. of Suddenly Terminal Summertime. Observer fifteen May 1960: 21.
McCarten, John. "The Electric current Cinema: Meagre Merriment." Rev. of Suddenly Terminal Summertime. New Yorker 9 Jan. 1960: 74–75.
Meyer, Moe, ed. The Politics and Poetics of Camp. London: Routledge, 1994.
"The New Pictures." Rev. of Suddenly Terminal Summer. Fourth dimension 11 Jan. 1960: 64+.
Paller, Michael. Gentlemen Callers: Tennessee Williams, Homosexuality, and Mid-Twentieth-Century Broadway Drama. New York: Palgrave, 2005.
Palmer, R. Barton, and William Robert Bray. Hollywood'south Tennessee: The Williams Films and Postwar America. Austin: U of Texas P, 2009.
Pryors, Thomas M. "New Movie Role for Miss Taylor." New York Times 31 Oct. 1958: 33.
Pugh, Tison. Precious Perversions: Humor, Homosexuality, and the Southern Literary Canon. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2016.
Quigly, Isabel. "Neither Here nor At that place." Rev. of All of a sudden Last Summer. Spectator twenty May 1960: 736–38.
Sinfield, Alan. Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theatre in the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale Upwards, 1999.
Sofer, Andrew. "Self-Consuming Artifacts: Power, Functioning, and the Body in Tennessee Williams' All of a sudden Last Summer." Modern Drama 38 (1995): 336–47.
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Vidal, Gore. Palimpsest: A Memoir. New York: Random, 1995.
———. "Vidal Admires Tennessee—Only." Variety 29 Aug. 1960: 55.
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W, Anthony. "1 Milk Train, Ane Scandal." Crandell 211–xiv.
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Williams, Tennessee. "Interview with Tennessee Williams." Interview by Cecil Brown. Devlin 251–83.
———. "Interview with Tennessee Williams, Yukio Mishima, and Dilys Powell." Interview by Edward R. Murrow. Devlin 69–77.
———. "Meeting with Tennessee Williams." Interview by Jeanne Fayard. Devlin 208–12.
———. Memoirs. 1972. New York: New Directions, 2006.
———. "New Tennessee Williams Rises from 'Stoned Historic period.'" Interview by Don Lee Keith. Devlin 147–threescore.
———. Portrait of a Madonna. The Theatre of Tennessee Williams. Vol. 6. New York: New Directions, 1981. 107–27.
———. "Studs Terkel Talks with Tennessee Williams." Interview by Studs Terkel. Devlin 78–96.
———. Suddenly Last Summer. The Theatre of Tennessee Williams. Vol. 3. New York: New Directions, 1971. 343–423.
———. "Tennessee Williams." Interview past Charles Ruas. Devlin 284–95.
———. "To Carson McCullers." i Mar. 1948. Letter 93 of The Selected Messages of Tennessee Williams. Devlin and Tischler 170–71.
———. "To Oliver Evans." twenty Feb. 1952. Alphabetic character 230 of The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams. Devlin and Tischler 420–21.
———. "Williams on a Hot Tin Roof." Interview by Don Ross. Devlin fifty–53.
Windham, Donald, ed. Tennessee Williams' Letters to Donald Windham, 1940–1965. New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1976.
Source: http://tennesseewilliamsstudies.org/journal/work.php?ID=131
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