Rating: 
Summary: LOBOTOMIZE YOUR DAUGHTER - MAKES THE PROBLEM GO AWAY!
Review: "Suddenly Last Summer" is a Southern gothic tale about a gaddabout dame (Elizabeth Taylor) who saw something so frightening while on a vacation in Greece that it made her go nuts. How do you solve a problem like Elizabeth? Well that's easy - you cut half her brain out. At least that's what Katharine Hepburn would like to do. Montgomery Clift, as the sympathetic doctor, has other ideas however. This is high camp and low melodrama but strangely enough it works - and brilliantly so.TRANSFER: Columbia gives us an average transfer. The grayscale is a bit off with too low a contrast level that registers most scenes in tonal gray instead of true black and white. Age related artifacts are everywhere. Ditto for a hint of compression related digital artifacts and some minor edge enhancement. The audio is MONO but nicely balanced.
EXTRAS: NONE! If you've purchased more than two Columbia Classics you should be used to this skimy treatment by now!
BOTTOM LINE: This is compelling cinema on the verge of a crying gag. It plays like Shakespeare mixed with Barnum and Bailey at I highly recommend it for this reason alone!
Rating:
Summary: LOBOTOMIZE YOUR DAUGHTER - MAKES THE PROBLEM GO AWAY!
Review: "Suddenly Last Summer" is a Southern gothic tale about a gaddabout dame (Elizabeth Taylor) who saw something so frightening while on a vacation in Greece that it made her go nuts. How do you solve a problem like Elizabeth? Well that's easy - you cut half her brain out. At least that's what Katharine Hepburn would like to do. Montgomery Clift, as the sympathetic doctor, has other ideas however. This is high camp and low melodrama but strangely enough it works - and brilliantly so. TRANSFER: Columbia gives us an average transfer. The grayscale is a bit off with too low a contrast level that registers most scenes in tonal gray instead of true black and white. Age related artifacts are everywhere. Ditto for a hint of compression related digital artifacts and some minor edge enhancement. The audio is MONO but nicely balanced.
EXTRAS: NONE! If you've purchased more than two Columbia Classics you should be used to this skimy treatment by now!
BOTTOM LINE: This is compelling cinema on the verge of a crying gag. It plays like Shakespeare mixed with Barnum and Bailey at I highly recommend it for this reason alone!
Rating:
Summary: LOBOTOMIZE YOUR DAUGHTER - MAKES THE PROBLEM GO AWAY!
Review: "Suddenly Last Summer" is a Southern gothic tale about a gaddabout dame (Elizabeth Taylor) who saw something so frightening while on a vacation in Greece that it made her go nuts. How do you solve a problem like Elizabeth? Well that's easy - you cut half her brain out. At least that's what Katharine Hepburn would like to do. Montgomery Clift, as the sympathetic doctor, has other ideas however. This is high camp and low melodrama but strangely enough it works - and brilliantly so. TRANSFER: Columbia gives us an average transfer. The grayscale is a bit off with too low a contrast level that registers most scenes in tonal gray instead of true black and white. Age related artifacts are everywhere. Ditto for a hint of compression related digital artifacts and some minor edge enhancement. The audio is MONO but nicely balanced.
EXTRAS: NONE! If you've purchased more than two Columbia Classics you should be used to this skimy treatment by now!
BOTTOM LINE: This is compelling cinema on the verge of a crying gag. It plays like Shakespeare mixed with Barnum and Bailey at I highly recommend it for this reason alone!
Rating: 
Summary: Unacknowledged masterpiece
Review: Amezmerizinly beautiful film stands as an indictment of predatory pederasty
perhaps the only role to fully exploit Clift's brooding sexuality
Rating: 
Summary: SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER........
Review: Another one of those depressing, yet thoroughly engrossing Tennessee Williams tales of hidden homosexuality and madness. A very cleverly done movie hitting all the high marks, and the low ones as well, with beautiful Liz Taylor as "crazy" cousin Cathy, and Kate Hepburn as the overprotective and over-attached Violet Venable. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
Rating:
Summary: A Masterful Masterpiece
Review: As a screenwriter, i much enjoyed watching this film for the first time as a teenager slowly understanding what career path i wanted to take. The mystery and suspense played out by the enigmatic and legendary Elizabeth Taylor, and blunt and also legendary Katherine Hepburn played out on my previoisly unknown desire to create masterpieces such as this movie. it will forever reamin on my top 10 list of experty acted, written, directed and produced films of all time.
Rating:
Summary: Cannibalism and homosexuality: what more could one ask for?
Review: Based on a ONE-ACT Tennessee Williams play whose plot is too bizarre to give away. Some people actually take this film seriously. One reviewer even calls it a "neglected classic." It is not. Elizabeth Taylor is passible, but the other actors are wretched: either ludicrously over the top (Katherine Hepburn and Mercedes McCambridge) or ludicrously under it. The latter category belongs to post-car accident Montgomery Clift who wanders through the film looking shell shocked; sadled with a hopeless part, surrounded by actors rentlessly chewing the scenary, he seems stupified. (Everyone but Taylor's character appears to be in need of a lobotomy -- except Clift who appears to have already had one.) Besides this, we also have Joseph Mankiewicz's typically workmanlike directing -- he adds not a bit of nuance or style to the proceedings.
If the movie is fascinating to watch, nevertheless, it is because the general hysteria (the performances, the plot, the dialogue) somehow seems a consequence of the film's inability to speak directly about its homosexual subject matter. What is Sebastian's death scene in Cabeza de Lobo but some "perverse" sexual act that the Taylor character can only interpret as an act of cannibalism?
Rating:
Summary: Forbidden Topics in a 1950's Gothic Drama
Review: Cannibalism and Incest in a film from the 1950's? Unheard of. This was a Risque movie to make and all involved were playing with their careers. The Effect? A spellbinding performance on the part of Katherine Hepburn. An convincingly desperate performance from Elizabeth Taylor. An appropriatly aloof performance from Montgomery Clift as the psychiatrist/nero-surgeon trying to get the the heart of the matter in a sick, twisted, and distrubing situation. The movie is glorious in its senic black and white photography and has aged well. A twisted and provocative presentation of Civilization Vs. Nature, Good Vs. Evil.
Rating:
Summary: NUTS and OTHER LOOSE OBJECTIVES..............
Review: Cannibalism! Whispers about Forbidden Love! That [yet again] Southern Gothic Mansion! Madness and potential Surgery..... There was just something slightly unspoken about this one - and it made quite an impact in 1958/9, ... you know the wet, white bathing suit clinging to drop-dead gorgeous Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn's magnificent entrance [slightly rivalled by Tim Curry's 'Rocky Horror' entrance, but probably originally inspired by Crawford's entrance in 'Rain']; Montgomery Clift as Dr. "Sugar" who has to remove this 'poison' from Taylor. [He was virtually a mirror-image of soul-twin Taylor]. In a nutshell so to speak - Taylor witnesses "something traumatic" [to say the least] 'whilst on vacation' with mama Hepburn's boy - seems he was literally eaten by a crowd of boys, err young men - something like that - all pre-dates David Lynch, but it's quite close...and now Hepburn [the oddly strange mama] wants Taylor treated a.s.a.p. before the dreadful truth [?] comes forth! QUITE a tour-de-force, and highly recommended for any serious aspiring theapian [There are wonderous Williams gems on film from this period - censored, but close to the master]. Also a rare supporting cast, bordered with the likes of Mercedes McCambridge, Albert Dekker etc. Oscar nods to both leading ladies, and quite magnificent in wide-screen black and white, - color would ruin this. Instantly condemned for subject-matter when released - the returns were quite splended. For some or other odd reason this movie double-bills rather well with "The Exorcist".
Rating:
Summary: Southern Gothic
Review: Directed by Mankiewicz from a one-act Tennessee Williams play, SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER concerns a wealthy New Orleans society matron (Hepburn) who seeks to bribe a local doctor (Cliff) into performing a lobotomy on her oversexed and overwrought niece (Taylor)--who has shamed the family with a publically told story of "something that happened last summer." A torrid melodrama with a weird hothouse atmosphere reeking of social and mental decay, the resulting film can only be described as "southern gothic" at its best. William's powerful one act play suffers somewhat in its translation to the screen, largely because the compact one-act on which it was based was necessarily padded to fill out a full-length film. The film also has a very different conclusion which (although it works quite well in the film) lacks the sense of disquiet found in the play. I strongly disagree, however, with reviewers who feel censorship of the day got in the way of the story's point. The original play presented the story in the same oblique manner, and by requiring the viewer to piece the niece's story together the film draws the viewer into itself in a way that a flat statement of fact would prevent. Montgomery Cliff, seen here toward the end of his career and life, is the weak link in the cast, but although his performance is not one of his better efforts it isn't actually bad and it doesn't detract from the film. Hepburn is clearly cast against type and at times seems a bit out of place as a New Orleans resident, but she plays her role with considerable effective ferocity. But the real star here is Elizabeth Taylor, who gives a remarkably arresting over-the-top performance. Extreme though it is, Taylor's performance conveys the horror of the nightmarish event that has prompted the character's persistent hysteria, and the long scene in which she relives the incident is remarkable for its power and intensity. SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER caused a tremendous stink when it debuted and was condemned by virtually every serious film critic and moral watchdog group in the country as morbid, vulgar, and distasteful trash. And so it is--but that IS the nature of the story. Some viewers will find it excessive, some will find it unsavory, and some may point blank dislike everything about it, but the fact remains that it is extremely well done and amazingly memorable, and of all attempts to bring a Tennessee Williams script to the screen it is perhaps the most successful in terms of both atmosphere and raw power.
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