The Screengrab

Last week on Summerfest '08, we brought you a ripe slice of faux-Tennessee Williams by way of William Faulkner, with the overheated 1958 steamer The Long Hot Summer.  This week, we're cutting out the middleman and bringing you actual Tennessee Williams -- or as actual as Tennessee Williams could get given the restrictive studio censorship of the 1950s -- with Suddenly Last Summer.  As if reacting to a thrown-down gauntlet, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, a year after The Long Hot Summer debuted, said "Oh yeah?  We'll just see about that!", and brought in an even more dysfunctional cast to film an even more flowery tale of sexual repression with an even more transparently, and yet never explicitly, gay subtext than Hollywood was previously willing to put up with.  If you think all this sublimated gayness, sweaty sexuality, and boiled-over Freudianism is pretty heavy water for a frivolous feature about movies with the word 'summer' in the title to carry, well, blame Hollywood, not us -- apparently there's something about the months from May to September that gets producers and directors all moist and lascivious.  If someone out there has access to a university press, there's probably a good thesis floating around about why, exactly, "summer blockbuster" has transitioned in meaning these last few decades from "steamy romance about forbidden love" to "movie with lots of CGI where stuff gets blown all to shit".  It probably says something profound about our culture, unless it doesn't.

Anyway, let's get on with the latest forbidden fruit in our cinematic basket:  crack open some cognac, find yourself a nice Mediterranean beach on which to lounge, and join us for a viewing of Suddenly Last Summer!

THE ACTION: Catherine Holley (played by a luscious-looking Liz Taylor) has just returned from Europe, where she has gone all wiggy.  Apparently, while she was visiting, her cousin Sebastian, played by nobody because we never see him, was killed under mysterious circumstances, and the whole thing was just too, too unpleasant and caused Catherine to have a nervous breakdown.  Once she starts to recover, she makes cryptic but extremely disturbing comments about Sebastian's demise, which rubs his mom (played by Katherine Hepburn as the wonderfully named Mrs. Violet Venable) the wrong way.  Violet insists that Sebastian was a very nice young man and a deeply sensitive artist and that's all there is to that, and when Catherine insists that there was something peculiar about the lad, she is instructed to shut her yapper or have it shut for her, in the person of professional psychiatrist and lobotomy practitioner Montgomery Clift.  Eventually the truth comes out, or as much of the truth as the producers were allowed to show at the time:  Sebastian was murdered by his neighbors for his predatory sexual practices, and Catherine -- like Violet before her -- was being used by the nefarious fellow as his procurer.  (In fact, what is only hinted at in the movie is made explicit in the play:  Sebastian was a pederast at worst and a seducer of young men at best, who was not only killed by his neighbors, but eaten by them as well.  Creepy!)

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NEW YORK: "Thorold Dickinson’s World of Cinema" (March 19-25) at the Film Society of Lincoln Center pays tribute to an important but largely forgotten figure from the early history of the British cinema. The unassuming but movie-mad Dickinson worked his way up from editing jobs and various assignments pitch-hitting behind the camera on various productions before making his official directorial debut with the 1937 thriller The High Command. Dickinson got his chance to go Hollywood after the producer David O. Selznick saw his 1940 melodrama Gaslight; Dickinson turned the offer down, and Selznick showed him that there were no hard feelings by not only remaking Gaslight in slick Hollywood style (with George Cukor directing) but seeing to it that screenings of the original was suppressed in America. Dickinson's other films include the Pushkin adaptation The Queen of Spades, the Disraeli biopic The Prime MInister starring John Gielgud, and Hill 24 Doesn't Answer (1955), his last film but the first ever produced in Israel. He lived almost another thirty years, which he largely devoted to teaching, as Britain's first university professor of film in 1967. "It's terribly difficult to direct a film you don't want to make," he once said, by way of accounting for his early retirement with a total output of nine features. "That's why I've made so few."

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