Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) Crazy Old Lady Noir

How many crazy old lady Noir do we have? Classic Noir, Sunset Blvd. with Gloria Swanson of course, and Guilty Bystander with qualify Mary Boland, and maybe Ona Munson in The Shanghai Gesture, in Transitional Noir / Horror - maybe What Ever Happened to Baby Jane with Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte with Bette Davis and Olivia De Haviland, and Joan Crawford in Strait-Jacket. French Noir Série noire (1979) qualifies, and Neo Noir The Kill Off (1989). There's a few more out there, but I don't remember if they tip Noir for me or not without a rewatch.

Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz 

Mankiewicz  wrote and directed Classic Noir  Somewhere in the Night, House of Strangers, No Way Out). The film was written by Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal and is based on Tennessee Williams play. Cinematography was by Jack Hildyard (Hobson's Choice), The excellent music was by Malcolm Arnold and Buxton Orr.

Katharine Hepburn as Mrs. Violet "Vi" Venable

The film stars Katharine Hepburn as Violet "Vi" Venable. Elizabeth Taylor as Catherine "Cathy" Holly. Montgomery Clift as Dr. John Cukrowicz, Albert Dekker as Dr. Lawrence J. Hockstader, Mercedes McCambridge as Mrs. Grace Holly and . 

Montgomery Clift as Dr. John Cukrowicz

                                        Albert Dekker as Dr. Lawrence J. Hockstader, rt.

Elizabeth Taylor as Catherine "Cathy" Holly

Mercedes McCambridge as Mrs. Grace Holly

The story was originally a one act play written by Tennessee Williams, in 1957. The original play has Mrs. Venable a wealthy woman who lives in the Garden District of New Orleans inviting Dr. John Cukrowicz to her home, to discuss her niece Catherine. She speaks nostalgically about her son Sebastiawho died last summer in Spain.  

Suddenly, Last Summer was filmed at Shepperton Studios in the UK, and in Spain, northeast of Barcelona, and on Majorca.                                                                             

Violet should have been called "Cruella" In the film she is one demented, nasty, piece of work.

Story

New Orleans. A massive brick wall of the Lions View State Sanitarium, aka the "looney bin". We cut to the female bin.

The rec hall. The queen bee, struts her stuff through various clusters of drab, slightly disheveled, women. She stops in front of a woman sitting in, her, rocking chair. The woman gets up and vacates it immediately.

Cut to a woman smiling at the doll she holds, she's standing on a chair and is holding the doll up into the shaft of sunlight. It's shadow on the wall suddenly rising. The entire recreation hall dims. Visually and literally it's sunset on these women.

A door opens the nurses come in and flip on the interior lights and collect their charges. 

Cut to an operating theater. 

In the balcony, Dr. Lawrence J. Hockstader is praising his new chief neurosurgeon to the state health officials, Dr. John Cukrowicz who is demonstrating below a lobotomy. We get quick cuts of Doctor John "X" marking the spot, shots of his operating team, various surgical instruments one of which is a hand drill. Hockstader is promoting the new operation.

However the place is falling apart, One of the flood lamps dims and burns out and then rusty bolts from a railing support on the balcony give way, dropping plaster and dust. 

When the operation is finished Dr. John looks up at the audience and complains about the shoddy facilities he has to work in. You get the idea, the place is low priority bare bones minimum. 

He's never had to work in such crappy conditions

After Dr. John cleans up he barges into to Hockstader's office and complains to him about the conditions he must perform under. Hockstader tells him that their troubles maybe over,  Violet "Vi" Venable the richest woman in New Orleans is offering to build them a new facility on the vacant lot across the street. 

Hockstader tells Dr John, that she would like to meet hum. Why Not. Brand new facility can't beat that. If this was a musical they'd start singing here, right?

So Dr. John pays his respects to Violet. 

It's a palatial mansion. A secretary ushers Dr. John into a room where a gilded open elevator descends. Here again the shot starts with the elevator hole and it's darkness. A disembodied voice, Violet's, speaks out of the void Violet becomes revealed as the lift descends.

Violet: Sebastian always said, 'Mother when you descend it's like the Goddess from the Machine. You look just like angel coming to earth' as I float, float into view. Sebastian, my son Sebastian was very interested in the Byzantine. Are you interested in the Byzantine Doctor...?

Dr. John: Cukrowicz. I don't know very much about the Byzantine.

Violet: It seems that the Emperor of Byzantium - when he received people in audience - had a throne which, during the conversation, would rise mysteriously into the air to the consternation of his visitors. But as we are living in a democracy, I reverse the procedure. I don't rise, I come down.

The most entertaining part of this film is watching Dr. John reacting to all the outlandishly dark and twisted statements Violet utters during all their conversations.

She takes him out to Sebastian's atrium garden of prehistoric plants. 

She stops at a sort of miniature greenhouse to feed a live fly to a large Venus flytrap. Subtext anyone?

Sebastian was a poet she tells Dr. John, who wrote one poem a year until his untimely death, suddenly, last summer.

Violet: Strictly speaking, his life was his occupation. Yes, yes, Sebastian was a poet. That's what I meant when I said his life was his work because the work of a poet is th elife of a poet, and vice versa, the life of a poet is the work of a poet. I mean, you can't separate them. I mean, a poet's life is his work, and his work is his life in a special sense.

Eventually she gets around to what she really wants. She tells of getting a call last summer from Europe telling her that her son had died in Spain and that her niece Catherine was in a mental institution. She was brought back to the states and is babbling disgusting hallucinatory lies about Sebastian.

Violet: She suffers from something called dementia praecox.

Dr. John: Dementia praecox?

Violet: Which is say, she's mad as a hatter, poor child.

Violet is all excited about Cukrowicz's specialty lobotomy. She wants Dr. John to perform a lobotomy on her niece Catherine.

Violet is all excited about Cukrowicz's specialty lobotomy. She wants Dr. John to perform a lobotomy on her niece Catherine.      

Dr. John: Mrs. Venable, loving your neice as you do, you must know there's great risk in this operation. Whenever you enter the brain with a foreign object...

Violet: Yes.

Dr. John: Even a needle thin knife.

Violet: Yes.

Dr. John:  In the hands of the most skilled surgeon...

Violet:  Yes, yes.

Dr. John: There is a great deal of risk.

Violet: But it does pacify them, I've read that, it quiets them down. It suddenly makes them peaceful.

Dr. John: Yes that that it does do, but...

Violet:  But what?

Dr. John: Well it will be years before we know if the immediate benefits of the operation are lasting or maybe just passing or perhaps... there's a strong possibility that the patient will always be limited. Relieved of acute anxiety yes, but limited.

Violet: But what a blessing Dr. to be just peaceful. To be just suddenly peaceful. After all that horror. After those nightmares. Just to be able to lift up their eyes to a sky not black with savage devouring birds.

When Dr. John tells Mrs. Venable that he must evaluate Catherine before any operation, Mrs. Venable reveals that Catherine is telling obscene stories about Sebastian's death, she also tells of an incident with an elderly gardener where Catherine tried to seduce. When the gardener reported the incident Catherine accused him of sexual assault.

Once Dr. John interviews Catherine he starts having second thoughts. Complicating matters are Catherine's mother and brother who are being bribed by Mrs, Venable into signing commitment papers to the institution and a permission slip for the operation. Pressure is put on another front by Mrs. Venable who offers head of the institution Dr. Lawrence J. Hockstader one million dollars for a completely new facility.

It goes increasingly Noirsville as Dr. John, who continues to evaluate Catherine, eventually exposes the whole sleazy story surrounding Sebastian's death.

Noirsville

Gary Raymond as George Holly rt.

This is a well made film by Mankiewicz. All of the performances are spot on. It's a 1959 production but the MPPC is still in force. In the dialog it's explained that the mob of juveniles attracted to Sebastian are "hungry" and want money, but Mankiewicz has some quick cuts of some of these juvies actually sticking there hands and fingers in or towards their mouths, and the subtext is that Sebastian was paying them for something else entirely.  Jeez you know exactly what he was "feeding" them. There's even a line of dialogue where Catherine explains that Sebastian told her that "was "sated" with "the dark haired ones" and was "famished for blonds." How twistedly Noir is this?  

For me the only sequences that now seems quaintly much ado about nothing is the depiction of Sebastian dragging Catherine into the water in a swimsuit that supposedly became transparent when it got wet. It gets wet and it doesn't become visibly transparent, and it's remember 1958. The actual play, written in 1957 is supposed to be set in 1936. It may have made sense in 1936 but not by 1959. 

First bikini in 1946 scandalous maybe then, lol

"One of the most significant moments in the history of women’s swimwear was the creation of the bikini in 1946. The design of the bikini is credited to two separate designers who introduced the revolutionary garment at the same time. Jacques Heim, a French fashion designer, created a minimalist two-piece swimming garment in May 1946, called the Atome. Heim’s Atome featured a bra-like top and bottoms which covered the bottom and navel. Later that year, in July 1946, Louis Réard, an engineer turned designer, created what he called the bikini. Réard’s skimpy design, pictured in figure 11, consisted of only four triangles of material that were held together with string. The two designs competed for public attention and whilst Heim’s garment was the first to be worn on a beach, it was the term bikini, as coined by Réard, that stuck." (A History of Women’s Swimwear - Fashion History Timeline) 

It's all a very twisted story. An interesting psychological Noir with great performances 8/10.