THE HEIRESS 1949

"I'm sure you recognize this lovely melody as 'Stranger in Paradise.' But did you know that the original theme is from the 'Polovtsian Dance No. 2' by Borodin? So many of the melodies of well-known popular songs were actually written by the great masters…."

Thus began the TV commercial for 120 Music Masterpieces, a four-LP set of classical music selections offered by Columbia House and Vista Marketing from 1971 to 1984. This ubiquitous and long-running commercial featured British character actor John Williams (famous for the Hitchcock films Dial M for Murder and To Catch a Thief, but known in our household as the "fake Mr. French" from the sitcom Family Affair) touting the joys of discovering how many classical melodies were appropriated for contemporary pop songs.

This commercial and Williams' cultured English accent unfailingly come to mind whenever I watch The Heiress. The reason being that The Heiress' oft-repeated love theme—the 1784 Jean-Paul-Egide Martini classical composition Plaisir d'Amour (The Joys of Love)—had its melody borrowed for the popular ballad Can't Help Falling in Love in the 1961 film Blue Hawaii. The unfortunate result of all this is that every time the melody is played in the movie (and that's quite a lot), it evokes for me not Victorian-era romance, but Vegas-era Elvis Presley.

Ever the Method actor, Clift learned to play the piano for this scene
in which Morris sings The Joys of Love to Catherine

This pop music cross-referencing has always only had the effect of cheapening the original compositions for me. Coming as it did a full 12 years before Elvis serenaded Joan Blackman in Blue Hawaii, it's not The Heiress's fault Elvis's version (never a favorite) is so hotwired into my brain that I fairly wince every time Plaisir d'Amour swells on the soundtrack, wrenching me out of The Heiress' scrupulously rendered 19^th century New York, and thrusting me onto some kind of Gilligan's Island vision of Hawaii. (I react similarly to the now-distracting use of 1939's Somewhere Over The Rainbow in the 1941 film noir I Wake Up Screaming.) Happily, my personal aversion to the song Plaisir d'Amour and its use in the film's score (something I might share with the film's Oscar-winning/Oscar-disowning composer Aaron Copland) is the sole complaint I have with William Wyler's classic romantic melodrama, The Heiress.

Olivia de Havilland as Catherine Sloper

Montgomery Clift as Morris Townsend

Ralph Richardson as Dr. Austin Sloper

Miriam Hopkins as Lavinia Penniman

The Heiress is one of my favorite popcorn movies. And that's "popcorn movie" in the old-fashioned sense: an enjoyably entertaining film, well-acted, with a good story intelligently told, no heavy message. Not the current definition signifying a check-your-brain-at-the-door exercise in sophomoric cretinism (cue my usual Adam Sandler, Fast & Furious diatribe).

Based on the 1947 Broadway play by Ruth & Augustus Goetz, which itself was adapted from Henry James' 1880 novel Washington Square, The Heiress is a serious drama, to be sure. But anything more profound to be unearthed in its subtext regarding the emotionally stifling social class system or the lingering imprint of love lost (The Heiress overflows with widows and widowers who live in the memory of the departed, never entertaining the thought of finding someone new), remains in service of a not-unfamiliar "Poor Little Rich Girl" romantic melodrama.

As a motion picture adapted from an esteemed literary work, The Heiress was Paramount's "prestige film" for the year, its pre-release publicity suggesting a Grand Romance between fated-to-be lovers kept apart by some shadowy adverse obstacle. In truth, the film is really a rather severe, withering rumination on love (familial love, romantic love, self-love) and the injurious cost of its absence.

Three is the Magic Number
The Heiress was Montgomery Clift's 3rd film, and his co-star was three years older 

Catherine Sloper (de Havilland) is an unprepossessing, socially awkward young woman whose very existence is a source of nagging disappointment to her widowed father, physician Austin Sloper (Richardson). Dr. Sloper's beloved wife died giving birth to Catherine, yet lives on as an idealized phantom presence in Dr. Sloper's heart and in the household he shares with his daughter. A presence to whom Catherine, in her failure to live up to even a modicum of her mother's beauty or social graces, is ceaselessly compared and judged. Forced to grow up in the shade of her father's barely contained reproach and resentment, Catherine's natural virtues (visible to us in private moments where she reveals herself to have brains and a winning sense of humor) have understandably failed to flower.

Sharing their home in Washington Square is Dr. Sloper's sister, Lavinia (Hopkins), a somewhat frivolous but prototypical example of the kind of aimless social butterfly women were expected to be in Victorian times. Given to silly flights of romantic fantasy and hyperbole, yet well-versed in the dos and don'ts of society protocol, Lavinia is tolerated for her ability to assist Catherine in developing the social graces. Supportive of her niece and devoted to not seeing her drift heedlessly into spinsterhood with only her embroidery to keep her company, Lavinia is nevertheless one more pitying voice reminding Catherine of her lack.

Miriam Hopkins is the queen of the silly and superficial busybody.
No matter how extremely her character is written, she finds both the humor and the humanity

Although Dr. Sloper and Lavinia are both of the mind that Catherine's failings in looks and charm are significantly mitigated by her being an heiress with a considerable fortune, Lavinia is too much of a romantic to ever admit to such base pragmatism, while Dr. Sloper regards the assessment as indisputable fact…like a medical diagnosis.

Curious, then, that when an outside party is suspected of appraising Catherine by similarly pragmatic terms—the outside party being the dashing, obscenely handsome, and penniless young suitor Morris Townsend (Clift)—it is Dr. Sloper who lodges the loudest protest.

What I like about The Heiress is that it does a remarkable job of putting us in the middle of the film's dramatic/romantic conflict without specifically telling us how we should feel about it. At times it appears as though Dr. Sloper is unnecessarily brusque in his assessment of his daughter, but he isn't entirely wrong. At the same time we also see that there is more to Catherine than her retiring demeanor belies, making us hope that "someone" comes along and sees in her what those around her fail to recognize.
When that someone comes in the form of Montgomery Clift, playing a man in possession everything that Catherine lacks except money; we can't help but feel (hope) that at least in some ways, this pair is well-suited. Certainly the superficial attractions of physical beauty are no more a barrier to true love than the superficial allure of wealth?

Playboy After Dark
Does our distrust of Morris come from the reversal of the beauty ethic (women are supposed to be the pretty ones), or the reversal of the patriarchal tradition (men are expected to support women)?

The Heiress deviates from the play in that it never makes the honorableness of Morris' attentions entirely clear. At least not initially. As the film progresses, we are manipulated back and forth, forced to view Morris' whirlwind courtship of Catherine through the alternating perspective of Dr. Sloper's suspicious eyes or Lavinia's willfully rose-colored gaze.
Provocatively, we're placed in the position of preferring to be right rather than see Catherine happy (her father, again), or hoping…perhaps beyond reason…that Townsend is not really what he seems and merely a penniless suitor genuinely seeing in Catherine that which we ourselves have been witness to: her very real charms have just not been given the opportunity to develop in the loveless home she shares with her father in Washington Square.

The film tugs at our beauty biases, our belief in Cinderella fantasies, and our weakness for ugly duckling myths. It also, in providing an emotionally and dramatically satisfying ending that deviates from the novel, taps into the kind of visceral revenge scenario beloved of any individual who has ever felt undervalued or underestimated. 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Popular Hollywood movies all tap into common fantasies. There's clearly a market out there for romantic comedies about cloddish, schlubby boy-men who win impossibly beautiful women simply because they possess an ounce of common decency. That is to say, I assume there to be a market for it based on the sheer number of Seth Rogen films out there; I'm just happy I don't know that market personally. 

Because of the unique circumstances of my adolescence: shy, a member of one of the few African-American families in a largely white neighborhood, gay in an all-boys Catholic high-school—I find myself drawn to stories about outsiders. Those who are habitually overlooked and underestimated because they don't conform to established norms.

"I'd never contradict him."

I'm afraid my response to my formative years are reflected in the brand of "outsider" films which have become my favorites over the years: Carrie (shy teen kills entire senior class), That Cold Day in the Park (shy spinster kills for and imprisons sex slave); 3 Women (shy enigma engages in personality theft - deaths to follow)...you get the picture. While never seriously interested in purging the patina of my youth in such melodramatic ways, I'm aware that revenge fantasies rate inordinately high amongst the films in my collection. Vicarious projection, I guess.
The Heiress fits easily into this informal sub-genre, it being a kind of tragic pop fairy-tale that tells the story of a woman who, having misguidedly invested her sense of self and happiness in finding someone who deems her worthy of being loved, seeks that tenuous approbation in the eyes of not one, but two woefully inadequate men. Though her path is one both heartbreaking and life-alteringly painful, Catherine nevertheless comes to arrive at a place of self-discovery, self-acceptance and, ultimately strength. 

And, conforming to the ambiguous emotional tone of all that went before, the ending of The Heiress can be viewed as either tragic or triumphant with no loss to the film's overall effectiveness and poignance.

"That's right Father. You never will know, will you?"

Olivia de Havilland's thorough and complete transformation from doting daughter to embittered adversary is as chilling as it is heartbreaking.

PERFORMANCES

When writing this essay, it came as something of a surprise to me to discover that I've only seen Olivia de Havilland in six films; four of them from her less-than-stellar, post-Lady in a Cage period. But this is more a reflection of the type of movies she appeared in (westerns, period adventure films...neither particular favorites) than a reaction to the actress herself, who, as of this writing, is still with us at age 99.

The Heiress represents Olivia de Havilland's 5th (and final) Oscar nomination
and 2nd win in the Best Actress category

Within my admittedly narrow sphere of exposure, I have nothing but admiration for de Havilland's work in The Heiress. It cannot be an easy feat to imbue an outwardly plain, reactive character like Catherine with as much depth and feeling as de Havilland achieves. Perhaps a flaw in the play's structure is that it is impossible to adapt it in a way in which Catherine can ever be seen in a light reflective of how her father sees her. (Wyler encourages us to identify with and like Catherine. Her comic resilience in the face of humiliation after humiliation wins us over.)
In our being able to so readily appraise and recognize Catherine's worth, her father becomes a villain before he gets a chance to show the sympathetic side of his case. (Marginally sympathetic, anyway. One can empathize with a man missing his wife, but to withhold affection from a motherless child due to repressed resentment or blame is cruel and tragic.). But as I've stated, the narrative tipping point falls to the casting of Morris, and whether or not the actor playing the role is able to conceivably play sincerity and knavishness with equal credibility.

Recreating the role he played on the London stage, Ralph Richardson (knighted Sir in 1947)
is remarkable as the over-assured and unyielding Austin Sloper. The sureness of his performance
serves as the virtual touchstone for everyone else in the film 

I like Montgomery Clift a great deal, but if reports are true that he was deeply dissatisfied with his performance in The Heiress, I can't say his feelings are entirely unfounded. Simply put, he seems to be outclassed and a tad out of his depth when it comes to the performances of de Havilland, Richardson, and Hopkins. To be sure, this could merely be an instance of clashing acting styles, his co-stars representing a more formal, old-guard style of acting to his more relaxed contemporary technique. The latter resulting in the actor occasionally coming across as stiff and uncomfortable.

However, in his defense, Clift's very "otherness" in manner and speech (whether intentional or not) works marvelously within the context of the story. His Morris Townsend is a character we are meant to be unsure of; unaware of where the real person ends and the artifice begins. He introduces passion and impulse into the Sloper's world of strict formality. Clift's awkwardness, which wreaks havoc with the viewer's ability to ascertain his character's sincerity, winds up adding a great deal to Morris' ambiguity.

Sizing Up The Interloper

Montgomery Clift's Method-era naturalness comes from somewhere so genuine that you don't entertain for a minute that he is not as he seems. His beauty is suspicious, but his behavior is not. He seems ill-suited to a certain level of showy artifice, so his scenes with de Havilland have a warmth that has you rooting for their union even as you sense it is ultimately impossible.
I like him a great deal in the film, even while recognizing his Morris Townsend is perhaps not one of his strongest performances.

As Audrey Hepburn did in Two for the Road, Olivia de Havilland is able to convey very distinct stages in the emotional maturation of her character simply through her facial expressions, body language, and voice modulation. Here, Catherine Sloper has grown into a woman at peace with herself 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
The Heiress garnered a whopping eight Academy Award nominations in 1949: Best Picture, Director, Supporting Actor (Richardson), Cinematography - winning in the categories of Best Actress (de Havilland), Music (Aaron Copland..a matter of contention), Art Direction (J. Meehan, H. Horner, E. Kuri), and Costume Design (Edith Head, Gile Steele).
I'm particularly fond of the costume design and art direction in The Heiress, which is truly gorgeous. Even more so with today's digital restorations and HD TV screens.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Adapted from a Broadway production, The Heiress shows its stage roots in being a somewhat stagy and talky motion picture more reliant on dialog, performance, and characterization than action. In this instance I wouldn't have it any other way, for The Heiress has such marvelous, quotable dialog.

"No child could compete with this image you have of her mother. You've idealized that poor dead woman beyond all human recognition." 

"Headaches! They strike like a thief in the night! Permit me to retire, of course. It's not like me to give in, dear, but sometimes fortitude is folly!"

"He must come. He must take me away. He must love me. He must!...Morris will love me, for all those who didn't."

"How is it possible to protect such a willing victim?"

"Yes, I can be very cruel. I have been taught by masters."

"I can tell you now what you have done. You have cheated me. You thought that any handsome, clever man would be as bored with me as you were. It was not love that made you protect me. It was contempt."

BONUS MATERIAL

Composer Aaron Copland composed the original music theme for The Heiress before it was controversially reworked by Nathan Van Cleve under director William Wyler's orders.

Washington Square (1997): Agnieszka Holland - the director of the 2014 TV-movie remake of Rosemary's Baby - helmed this impressive-looking adaptation of Henry James' short novel starring Jennifer Jason Leigh, Albert Finney, and Maggie Smith. It's truer to the book than either the play or the 1949 film, so purists should be happy. But in spite of the good performances and lovely cinematography, the film failed to stay with me very long after seeing it. Some are sure to prefer it to the William Wyler film, but it reminded me of the kind of faithful movie adaptation you're required to watch in a high school English class after having read the book.

The legendary 120 Music Masterpieces  TV commercial

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2016

A PLACE IN THE SUN 1951

“Life is never quite interesting enough, somehow. You people who come to the movies know that.”                                     Shirley Booth as Dolly Levi in The Matchmaker (1958)

No truer words were ever spoken on the topic of what movies mean to us “dreamers.” I, like a great many film buffs (and as the title of this blog reiterates), am a dyed-in-the-wool dreamer. And for as long as I can remember, the allure of motion pictures for me has been their intrinsic link to the fundamental human need to dream, to long for, to imagine, to aspire to, and to hope.

Because I’m essentially an impractical, head-in-the-clouds fantasist for whom dreams have often proved a contradictory source of my greatest joys and deepest sorrows; I've always been intrigued by the curiously dual nature of dreaming. Dreams are inarguably at the root of all human ambition and invention, possessing the power to ease spiritual pain by way of escapism, inciting creativity, and spurring on the imagination to all manner of human achievement. Yet at the same time, dreams are equally prone to sowing seeds of dissatisfaction...fostering discontent and delusion when they create a hunger and desire for things that can never be attained. 

When I think about it, a great many of my favorite novels seem to be about the pernicious nature of idealism and dreams: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, and, apropos of this post, Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy. Dreiser being specifically the author I find to be the most compelling purveyor of narratives sensitive to the healing/hurtful siren song that is the myth of The American Dream.

Montgomery Clift as George Eastman

Elizabeth Taylor as Angela Vickers

Shelley Winters as Alice Tripp

A Place in the Sun is the story of George Eastman (Clift), the poor-relation nephew of pillar-of-society industrialist Charles Eastman, who flees a dead-end bellhop job in Chicago to be taken on as a worker in his uncle’s bathing suit factory. George is haunted by his stiflingly poor, rigidly religious upbringing, and is driven—to an almost pathological degree—to overcome the limitations of his meager education and humble origins. Applying considerable initiative toward his ambitions (evinced by his taking home-study courses and devising plans for factory efficiency in his spare time) George appears at first resigned, albeit restlessly, to work hard for his modest piece of the American Dream. But as bedeviled as George is about his impoverished past, it soon becomes clear that he is equally consumed with the desire for the kind of brass ring life his Eastman lineage dangles teasingly just beyond his grasp.

Locked Out
George Eastman stands dejectedly outside the gate of his uncle's estate, Charles Eastman. The large, ornamental "E" on the gate serving as a caustic reminder of a birthright denied

Ultimately, fate deals George an ironically cruel hand when the realization of all of his ambitions and dreams become certainties (his professional advancement and social acceptance coincide with a blossoming romance with the beautiful and glamorous socialite, Angela Vickers [Taylor]) at the very moment news of his impregnation of Alice, the plain-but-sweet factory co-worker (Winters) just as certainly signals the end to all he has ever hoped for.

While An American Tragedy (both the novel and the original 1931 film, which is said to be the most faithful adaptation) posit George’s dilemma within the parameters of a sociopath’s conundrum: George, not feeling much of anything for either girl, weighs the most selfishly advantageous outcome and plots to rid himself of the problematic pregnant girlfriend. A Place in the Sun’s intentionally romanticized construct encourages the viewer to sympathize/identify with George’s predicament. A device that ultimately (and provocatively) implicates us in the tragic turn of events as they play out.

"The reason they call it 'The American Dream' is that you have to be asleep to believe it."

George Carlin

Theodore Dreiser's pre-Depression era novel An American Tragedy sought to address the accepted American belief that hard work equaled affluence and advancement in a country where nepotism, bloodlines, and arbitrary class/social hierarchies impose distinct limitations. A Place in the Sun uses the false promise of post-war American prosperity as the bait that lures dreamers like George Eastman into believing "the good life" is his for the taking.

It always struck me as a little sad that George, so consumed with achieving his own dreams, never stopped to consider that a romance with a handsome Eastman (even a poor relation) might have felt like a dream come true to a plain factory girl like Alice.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

A common complaint leveled at A Place in the Sun is that the tension of the film’s central conflict is significantly weakened in having the drab and ultimately annoying Shelley Winters character rendered as such a blatantly unappealing option to the dream-girl perfection of Elizabeth Taylor. The implication being, I suppose, is that if given the opportunity, anyone in his right mind is going to try to drown the sympathetic but whiny Winters if it will help land them the exquisitely beautiful, sweet-natured (and let’s not forget, loaded) Elizabeth Taylor. If that’s true, what does that say about us?

The near-identical beauty of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor emphasizes their compatibility

Therein lies my fascination with A Place in the Sun. Instead of turning Dreiser’s novel into just another crime story with a social commentary overlay, George Stevens—drawing upon the entire arsenal of cinematic devices that helped give Hollywood its reputation as America’s “Dream Factory”—idealizes the tale and subtly seduces, making us complicit allies in George’s social-climbing fantasies. He structures the film as an unabashedly romanticized, male Cinderella fairy tale about “fated to be mated” lovers threatened by the ugly specter of poverty and deprivation. The latter is embodied by the likable but difficult-to-root-for Shelley Winters.

With every lovingly-photographed close-up of the impossibly beautiful couple…with every lushly orchestrated romantic idyll captured in passionate tableau…we’re not only encouraged to project our fantasies onto the idealized couple, but to see them as sympathetic souls deserving of having their dreams come true. Something not possible without vilifying the story’s real victim (Winters) as the sole obstacle to their happiness. 

The genius of A Place in the Sun, and why I consider it to be a minor masterpiece, is how, through the juxtaposition of appealing images of wealth and dreary images of poverty, the audience, when faced with the issue of what to do about the blameless but problematic Shelly Winters character, are placed in the same morally ambiguous position as Montgomery Clift.

PERFORMANCES

Only two of the 9 Oscar nominations A Place in the Sun garnered in 1951 were in the acting categories: Best Actor, Montgomery Clift, and Best Actress Shelley Winters (it won a whopping 6 awards, including Best Director for Stevens). The always-impressive Clift brings a heartbreaking vulnerability to what I think is one of his best screen performances. At no moment do you ever feel he is being moved forward by the plot. You can see every thought and motivation play out on his face. 

On A Place in the Sun’s DVD commentary track, much is made of the fact that in taking on the role of the mousy Alice Tripp, blond bombshell Shelley Winters astounded audiences by so playing against type. Winters is, indeed, very good, but if you’re like me and largely unfamiliar with the work of Shelley the sexpot, her role feels right in step with characters she played in a great many of her latter films (1955s The Night of the Hunter comes to mind), and thus her performance doesn't feel like the huge departure it perhaps once did.

If your goal is to make plausible the notion that an otherwise sane man would resort to murder for the love of a woman, you're definitely on the right track if that woman is then 17-year-old Elizabeth Taylor. What a knockout! Overlooked by the Academy, her performance in A Place in the Sun is rather remarkable. She gives a surprisingly mature performance—one of her best, in fact—proving to be particularly effective in her later scenes. Taylor would work again with director George Stevens in Giant (1956), and the truly bizarre misfire, The Only Game in Town (1970).

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

My deep affection for A Place in the Sun extends to the way it uses romantic imagery to convey the illusory allure of desire and longing. And by illusory allure, I mean that dreams are only pleasant when they hold out the possibility of coming true. To want for something you can't have tears you apart.

George is frequently photographed surrounded by idealized images of success and wealth

Like the beckoning light on Daisy's dock in The Great Gatsby
George studies high school classes under the flickering neon reminder of the Vickers family fortune

(Above) "Ophelia", John Everett Millais' mid-19th Century painting depicting the drowning death of Shakespeare's heroine, looms ominously over George's head (below) as he ponders: how do you solve a problem like Alice Tripp?

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

A Place in the Sun is one of those rare screen adaptations of a beloved book that captures the author's intent even though it plays fast and loose with the original text. Theodore Dreiser's 1925 novel was turned into a Broadway play in 1926, and a film by Josef von Sternberg in 1931 (for which it is said Dreiser didn't care).  Screenwriters Michael Wilson and Harry Brown adapted the 1951 film, and while faithful adaptations are fine, I love when collaborators are able to stay true to the feel of an artist's work, even when its superficial form has been altered. George Stevens has created a forcefully cinematic film that tells its story with a language all its own. It's beautiful to look at, wonderful to listen to (the Franz Waxman score is a real highlight), and boasts a slew of first-rate performances. It's a near-perfect film.
Near perfect...

Although Raymond Burr, cast as the prosecuting attorney, is actually fine (I guess. It's the same performance he's given for decades), his close association with the Perry Mason character proves a big distraction to me. When he shows up, this absolutely breathtakingly engrossing romantic drama suddenly becomes a TV program.

Similarly, and due to no fault of the actor himself, the casting of Paul Frees as the priest during the film's pivotal final minutes just sticks in my craw. Why? Because as I child, I watched Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color on TV for years. Anyone familiar with the show will recognize Frees' distinctive voice as the narrator of a million Disney documentaries. And as he is also the voice of the Ghost Host at Disneyland's Haunted Mansion, every time he speaks I'm thrust out of the narrative. Frees' voice is waaaay too hardwired with Disney associations to work on any level for me. Given that he's also the voice of animated no-goodnick Boris Badenov (whom I adore), I suppose I should just be thankful Frees never resorts to speaking in a Pottsylvanian accent.

Watching A Place in the Sun is an immensely pleasurable experience that satisfies no matter what aspect of its story you choose to focus on: the romance, the social commentary, the crime drama, or, my personal preference, the melancholy discourse on the failings of the American Dream. If you haven't seen A Place in the Sun in a while, it's definitely worth another look. If you've never seen it before, well, prepare to be swept away. I am...every time I see it.

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 -2013

SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER 1959

Watching Suddenly, Last Summer (adapted for the screen by Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams from Williams'1958 play), it's hard not to think about the frequency with which homosexuality=death themes crop up in Tennessee Williams' works, and to wonder to what extent some gay artists have been subtly complicit in perpetuating damaging social perceptions of homosexuality. 

           

In 1937 New Orleans (a year necessary perhaps to emphasize the infancy of lobotomy surgery, but not at all evident in the '50s-style clothes, hairdos, and make-up on display), super-rich widow Violet Venable seeks to secure— through not-so-subtle bribery—the services of groundbreaking psychosurgeon John Cukrowicz. Her objective is to have the doctor perform a lobotomy on her beautiful niece, Catherine, who apparently went insane the previous summer after witnessing the death of Mrs. Venable's adult son, Sebastian.

Lady's Very Hungry Today
"The Venus Fly-Trap, a devouring organism aptly named for the goddess of love."

The mysterious particulars of Sebastian's death, life, and the reason behind Mrs. Venable's wish to silence her niece make up the narrative body of Suddenly, Last Summer. A film whose overarching Freudianism (intentionally or not) parallels closet homosexuality with everything from pedophilia and mother fixation to sociopathology and flesh-eating prehistoric monsters. 

Elizabeth Taylor as Catherine Holly

Katharine Hepburn as Mrs.Violet Venable

Montgomery Clift as Dr. John Cukrowicz

If Tennessee Williams' views on same-sex relations are unremittingly bleak, I suppose one can't overlook the fact that Williams (of whom nothing I've read biographically would indicate a familiarity with love or happiness to any sizable degree) was nothing if not a product of his repressed, shame-based time. Raised in that bastion of open-mindedness, the American South, Williams (1911- 1983) had his most significant commercial successes during the '40s and '50s, a time when balanced/loving depictions of homosexuality would likely have resulted in his professional ostracism, if not incarceration. It's a certainty that audiences at that time had no interest in seeing homosexuality portrayed as anything other than deviant aberration. But there's no ignoring Williams' willing participation in promoting this perspective. This despite Tennessee Williams being one of the few "out" public figures I can recall from my youth.

Expressly acknowledged queer characters appear in only a handful of this prolific playwright's body of work: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Skipper, who commits suicide); A Streetcar Named Desire (Blanche's husband Allan, also a suicide); and this, Suddenly, Last Summer (Sebastian, murdered and cannibalized). But wouldn't you know it? They're the works that have had the greatest longevity. (Tennessee Williams didn't initiate popular culture's tiresomely persistent association of homosexuality with death. In Lillian Hellman's 1934 play, The Children's Hour, a character's mere suspicion that she might be a lesbian is enough to induce her to hang herself.)

There are those who believe it's folly to look at old movies through a contemporary prism. I personally think that it's essential to keep in mind the cultural context and social time frame of films; but I also believe that all true art endures. And as such, one of the important challenges facing any creative work to which the term "art" is to be applied is its ability to withstand the critical application of changing cultural sensibilities.

Mercedes McCambridge (Giant) and Gary Raymond ( Look Back in Anger)
as Violet Venable's poor relations

 Suddenly, Last Summer (my favorite of all the films adapted from Tennessee Williams' plays) passes the test because its antipathetic attitude towards homosexuality merely mirrors the film's more prominent themes of nihilism. NOBODY in a Tennessee Williams film is ever having much fun. It goes with the territory.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

In an unfavorable review of Suddenly, Last Summer in The New York Times, critic Bosley Crowther denounced the film for its talkiness. A valid point, perhaps, for 1959. But in today's "Era of the Inarticulate," the euphuistic language of Suddenly, Last Summer is like an oasis in a desert.

"The dinosaurs are vegetarian… that's why they became extinct. They were just too gentle for their size. And then the carnivorous creatures, the ones that eat flesh...the killers… inherited the earth. But then they always do, don't they?"

"Life is a thief. Life steals everything."

"Most people's lives...what are they but trails of debris? Each day more debris, more debris. Long, long trails of debris with nothing to clean it all up but death."  

"Mr. Venable was a good man, but dull to the point of genius."

"Of course God is cruel. No, we've always known about Him. The savage face he shows to people and the fierce things he shouts. That's all we ever really see or hear of him now. Nobody seems to know why."

Sebastian's empty book of poetry

  

PERFORMANCES

My admiration for Elizabeth Taylor is well documented in the blog posts for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Reflections in a Golden Eye. The real surprise for me here is how much I was impressed by Katharine Hepburn. Never one of my favorite actresses, here all of her starchy mannerisms and stylistic affectations have been put to fine service in helping to flesh out the marvelously complex character of Violet Venable. As the domineering, cold-hearted mother who is willing to go to monstrous lengths to protect the reputation of her son, Hepburn could have easily played the brittle, icy card exclusively and her performance would still have been a marvel. What she does that really blows me away is convey, through wounded, frightened looks and a barely-perceived sense of grasping desperation; her character's achingly lonely, desolate life. In the film's final moments, when it becomes clear that the obsessive, stifling love of Mrs. Venable's life never loved her at all, her character's complete and absolute despondency is heartbreaking.

The Goddess from the Machine

Katharine Hepburn's entrance in the film has to be one of the great screen entrances of all time. Descending from the ceiling in an ornate, cage-like elevator, Mrs. Venable addresses the surgeon she has summoned to her home: 

 "The Emperor of Byzantium, when he received people in audience, had a throne which during the conversation would rise mysteriously in the air to the consternation of the visitors. But as we are living in a democracy I reverse the procedure; I don't rise, I come down."

It's very nearly my favorite moment in the film.

  

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

When I was small, I remember my older sister telling me that Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift were really the same person, and scenes and photos of them together were accomplished through split-screen special effects, like on The Patty Duke Show. For a while, I actually believed her… although now it occurs to me that I never asked which of the two was the original article.

In the three films they made together (A Place in the Sun, Raintree County, and Suddenly, Last Summer) the dark, strikingly similar beauty of Taylor and Clift always insinuated a kind of spiritual kinship between their characters. A quality used to deeply empathetic effect in Suddenly, Last Summer. When Catherine first meets the doctor, we immediately sense (as does Catherine) that there is something the two share that makes it possible for him to so quickly allay her fear and apprehension.

 It also doesn't hurt that the duality of Taylor and Clift provides subtle subtext to Mrs. Venable's frequent assertions that her son Sebastian (so taken with Catherine's exploitable beauty) would have been "charmed" by the young doctor. Although we never see the much-discussed Sebastian, Mrs. Venable is quick to note of Dr. Cukrowicz "You're very like him," and "Your eyes, so like his." 

(When informed that the word Cukrowicz is the Polish word for sugar, Mrs. Venable wastes no time in referring to the physician as Dr. Sugar; although from her tone it's impossible to ascertain if it's said in a friendly or mocking manner.)

The image of queerness Tennessee Williams presents in Suddenly, Last Summer may be grotesque to an almost preposterous degree, but I happen to like how it fits with the film's themes of duality and displacement. In this context, homosexuality is the ultimate attraction of self. As manifest by the self-loathing poet, Sebastian, the allure of the similar (similar dark beauty, similar refined tastes, similar pitiless view of humanity) is a hunger unfulfilled. Named for the martyred saint whose portrait dominates his studio, Sebastian's face is never shown, but we know his clothes perfectly fit his male cousin George, and that George (equally as dark as Dr. Cukrowicz and his sister, Catherine) looks from the back, remarkably like Sebastian.

Recurrent Imagery
Angel of Death statue first appearing in Sebastian's nightmarish garden (above) 
reappears on the hill in Cabeza de Lobo (Wolf's Head) where Sebastian meets his fate 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

I really love the structure of Suddenly, Last Summer. On first viewing, it's a puzzlingly bizarre Freudian murder mystery that grows increasingly dark and perverse as it leisurely wends its way towards its satisfyingly astonishing payoff. On repeat visits, the enjoyment derived from Suddenly, Last Summer comes from the many fascinating existential questions the film poses about God, humanity, and the nature of evil.

People frequently look to nature and, upon witnessing the brutal dance of carnage and death in the animal world, defend its neutrality. It's the cycle of life; it can't be characterized as evil because animals only kill out of hunger and a will to survive. Throughout all of nature (plant life: the carnivorous fly-trap; animal life: Mrs. Venable's witnessing of the sea turtles devoured by carnivorous birds) unspeakable violence, brutality, and the strong feeding on the weak, is accepted as random, blameless, and part of natural law.

Witness to The God of Carnage

Suddenly, Last Summer sets forth the provocative suggestion that man is just a sophisticated, complex animal. As primitive as the plants in Sebastian's nightmare garden. The hungers that drive man may be more complex, but are they just as elemental and necessary to survival as those of any carnivorous plant or four-legged beast? If man has a base hunger for love, a fear of loneliness and a need for human physical contact... aren't the feeding of these hungers simply natural acts, no less elemental than the will to survive? Should man engage in barbaric acts of cruelty and violence to feed these needs, could it be possible that God can be looking down upon it all with the same blameless neutrality we ascribe to nature? Suddenly, Last Summer is an allegorical rumination on the disquieting interchangeably of the words "devour" and "use" for the word "love."

Suddenly, Last Summer            The Day of the Locust

That Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal do such an eloquent job dramatizing such intriguing philosophical concepts is one reason why I'm able to (begrudgingly) overlook the patina of homophobia calcifying along the film's edges. 

But perhaps if I'm really being honest with myself, the one reason, above all others, for Suddenly, Last Summer remaining an all-time, lasting favorite-  it is the absolutely breathtaking Elizabeth Taylor

...the last of the great movie stars.

Copyright © Ken Anderson 2009 - 2012