Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

Tennessee Williams is no doubt one of America's great playwrights, but one of his plays during our postmodern "enlightened" times of moral relativity (any morality that is relative is no morality at all) that is avoided like the plague is his masterpiece of confession: Suddenly, Last Summer. In his Memoirs he relates an anecdote about him and a gay friend in Italy picking up a child, whom, if memory serves me well, was delivering newspapers on a bike. They drive the child in their rented car outside the city to a desolate place. The child becomes terrified, and Williams and friend proceed to engage the child in sex. Williams tells this story light-heartedly, expecting us to find humor in the fact that there was no way he or his friend would ever really hurt the child. This reminded me of a time in 1968 when I was playing pinnacle with three persons, and one of them, someone I didn't know, was telling the story of how right after graduation from high school, a straight-A student, he joined the army and went to Vietnam. Then he told of how he was assigned to helicopter duty, and as they passed over rice paddies they played a gambling game, dropping grenades on men, women and children, making wagers on who would be the first to blow up a body. And he would laugh at moments for emphasis on the humor of it. I couldn't bring myself to laugh, and I felt bad because I knew this was his confession, and if we laughed it would be a form of forgiveness. This is what I believe Tennessee Williams was doing in his memoirs. But Williams was a great artist, and it was inevitable that he would have to come around to exploring "the horror the horror" of what he had been doing with children, and this occurred in Suddenly, Last Summer. The play and the less-than-perfect film adaptation, although an excellent film, is Williams' greatest work not only because it is his confession, and therefore his most personal work, but because he executes it with pure poetry-he is at the height of his power as an artist in writing it. Read any one of his plays, and then read Suddenly: nothing quite like it. This is a poem-play that needs to be explored if we ever decide to seriously explore hebephile ideology, which I don't expect to occur anytime soon. Maybe after the dissolution and death of our dying culture.

I was immediately captivated by Katharine Hepburn's early monologue and the astonishingly well written play (Tennessee Williams) and screenplay (Gore Vidal) held me agog until Elizabeth Taylor's towards the end. It is an amazing start and a triumphant end whilst almost everything in-between is as good. The dialogue simply tingles the spine with its humour, doom laden gothic horror and barely believable implied depravity. I once thought fans that spoke of 'loving' a certain actress and being able to watch/listen to them all the time were having me on, if not themselves, but I have it for Elizabeth Taylor. I watch in awe as she spills out her character and imbues already dramatic scripts with even more involving and inspiring emotions. And, she looks fantastic. I thought she looked amazing in the early institution scenes and then she is glammed up! A great play given the very best treatment here and if Montgomery Clift was suffering during his performance he is still very effective in what he is asked to do, which as it involves mediating between the two ladies is no mean feat. Excellent.

Elizabeth Taylor is gorgeous. Montgomery Clift a very talented actor.Elizabeth Taylor plays a very embarrassing role (goodness, what actresses were put through during those days...) and strangely enough does alternatively well at it. It's a very difficult and totally central role, and she acts both superbly at times, and then unconvincingly during other scenes.Ultimately, the film attempts to be subtle in many different ways, summoning philosophical dialog between the Clift and the tortured Katherine Hepburn characters, a sense of plot and evil vs truth and purity (Taylor vs Hepburn), but really there's too much talking, it's a film that is more "theoretical" than anything else where the viewer is almost being spoonfed plot, overwhelmed with script, rather than discovering a story. Of course it is a psychological film, and such is the nature of such productions, but it's still really rather slow and the ending is just way over-the-top dramatic and the revelation seems too graphic, gratuitously, like there's no need for that much shock and it just doesn't come round well enough.Lots of time spent building something up that's just not worth it.

One can't fault the performances by the entire cast in "Suddenly, Last Summer." Elizabeth Taylor, Katherine Hepburn, Montgomery Clift, Albert Dekker, Mercedes McCambridge and Gary Raymond handle their roles very well. Taylor and Hepburn are superb. The direction and technical aspects of this film are excellent as well. What then is relegates this movie to only six stars. Two things – the heavy, stage-driven script and dialog are taxing for a movie. At times, it seems as though the drama is overdone in big measures. And that relates to the second debit – the story itself. The initial mystery of the plot helps keep one interested for a while, but the dark background leaves a sour taste for the story. In short, it's not entertaining, and there's not sufficient intrigue to overcome its debits. This is a movie about a character whom we never see because he died the previous year. Everyone loved Sebastian, so we hear repeatedly in the film. But the truth was that he disdained people and only used them for his selfish ends. He was a spoiled rich kid who lived off his parents' wealth. He was a manipulator and user of people – including his mother and cousin Catherine (played by Taylor) to lure boys and young men for his homosexual pleasures. The film touches on still more depravity, including a possible incestuous relationship between son and mother. Hepburn's Mrs. Venable shows signs of and makes remarks that hint at such an incestuous infatuation with her son. The film has other references to unstable relationships, depravity and mental imbalance. As I said, it's not an enjoyable or entertaining movie to watch. Some reviewers lament the movie industry code (the Hays Code and office were self-imposed by the movie industry), that it doesn't allow Sebastian's homosexuality to be discussed openly. Well, the year of the film is 1937, and everything I've read about the mid-20th century tells me that this was not a subject discussed openly in society. It was hush- hush when I was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s. So, with the Hollywood self-imposed code, this film actually portrays a story as it was more likely to happen in real life. Indeed, much of Hepburn's Mrs. Venable character is built around the "unspeakable" subject, just as such. The film is based on a one-act play by Tennessee Williams, and he and Gore Vidal revised the original, adding many scenes, roles and subplots. Apparently, the play, which ran off-Broadway initially in 1958, made direct references to homosexuality. The theater and films have always pushed the envelope on what is acceptable to discuss and show openly according to the mores of the time. In so doing, they may break ground and sometimes create works of art. But when they are about stories of the past, they often fail to portray the past accurately. By superimposing a current culture on a past time, the film industry takes away the ability of modern audiences to understand or learn something about that culture of the past. So, we lose something in the end and may wind up with a skewered notion of a particular time in history. Perhaps this type of story of hedonism, depravity and overt self- indulgence does best in a one-act play on the stage. But feature films of such dysfunctional families are few and far between.