Based on Tennessee Williams's play, SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER has been directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz in 1959. Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor were nominated in 1960 for the Oscar in the Best Actress in a Leading Role Category.
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New Orleans, 1937. Dr. Cukrowicz, a character played by Montgomery Clift, is the main neuropsychiatrist of the city State Asylum. The asylum desperately needs money while Montgomery Clift practices lobotomies on incurable patients. One day, Katharine -Mrs Venable- Hepburn, a rich widow who has read an article about Montgomery Clift's surgical skill, asks him to lobotomize her niece Elizabeth -Catherine- Taylor who is locked in a local religious hospital. She's ready to give 1 million dollar to the asylum as soon as the operation is completed. She also informs Clift that Catherine has become mad when Sebastian Venable, Hepburn's son and Catherine's cousin, died the precedent summer of an heart attack in Central America. Clift accepts to meet Catherine and soon realizes that the young woman suffers from amnesia and refuses to remember what has happened the last summer during the trip with Sebastian. He also understands that Hepburn hates Catherine because she took her place that summer at Sebastian's side. Until then, she used to spend every summer with her son, traveling around the world and helping him to write his yearly poem. Clift, urged by his hierarchy to perform the operation, tries to cure the girl by a more Freudian method than lobotomy, and, little by little, obtains more informations about the tragic events. He learns that the shy Sebastian always brought an attractive woman with him while traveling because he used them as baits to attract young men.
Maybe the best movie adapted from A Tennessee William's play.
The review of this Movie prepared by Daniel Staebler
