Ludicrous and ludicrously popular (La Liz and her spill-out one-piece bathing suit snagging the year’s fourth highest gross - see poster), Tennessee Williams’ symbolically inclined one-act poetic-horror was expanded by Gore Vidal into something concrete and obvious for producer Sam Spiegel & director Joseph L. Mankiewicz.* Elizabeth Taylor, vocally over-parted in a role that’s mostly monologues, is scheduled for a needless lobotomy by rich, eccentric Aunt Katharine Hepburn, a deluded grand dame who’ll do anything to silence her from talking about the death of Sebastian, the artistic son who scouted sexual adventure using Taylor as bait once Hepburn aged out of the role. Poor Montgomery Clift seems hopelessly dense as the operating surgeon/psychiatrist who can’t immediately see that it’s Hepburn who’s off her rich rocker and Liz who’s quite appropriately high-strung after playing unwitting catalyst to a horrific murder . . . and worse. Yikes! Mankiewicz getting away with his troubled cast (Clift in bad mental & physical shape; Hepburn going her own way - she famously spat at Mank and producer Spiegel after wrap; Taylor helped with her big climatic monologue on the death of Sebastian thru a dream-like fantasia of ill-clothed homoerotic bathers menacingly swarming the beach like some Pier Paolo Pasolini wet dream*) accepted the bad reviews and came out with his commercial rep reinvigorated.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Williams claimed to have thrown up after seeing the film, calling out ‘unfortunate concessions to realism that Hollywood is too often afraid to discard. And so a short morality play in lyrical style, was turned into a sensationally successful film that the public thinks was a literal study of such things as cannibalism, madness, and sexual deviation.’ While Mank called the one-act ‘a badly constructed play based on the most elementary Freudian psychology and one anecdote.’
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Lobotomy nothing abstract to Tennessee Williams whose sister, the model for Laura Wingfield in THE GLASS MENAGERIE, never fully recovered from one.
DOUBLE-BILL: *Follow up the idea in Pasolini’s best film, his directing debut ACCATTONE/’61 which shows a technical facility largely at odds with later work. (Credit 20-yr-old second-unit director Bernardo Bertolucci?)
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