american consumers
by Douglas Messerli
There's a wonderful moment in
Willard Carroll's excellent film comedy, Playing
by Heart, when an acting teacher responds to yet another rendition of
Catherine's monologue in Suddenly, Last
Summer: "If one more actress saunters into this class and recites
Catherine's 'Native boys ate Sebastian' speech, I am going to puke."
Angelia Jolie, playing Joan, who is about to do precisely that, escapes from
the room in horror.
I kept thinking of that line throughout my revisit to the Joseph L.
Mankiewicz version of Suddenly, Last
Summer yesterday. But I was having too much fun to feel any
gastrointestinal disorders. For, beyond the absurdity of William's
"poetic" play, the film version is simply a hoot. I can well
understand why Williams—despite penning, with Gore Vidal, the screenplay—utterly
denied any involvement with this fiasco, describing the work, like the teacher
in Carroll's film, as something that "made [him] throw up." Yet, for
all that, Suddenly, Last Summer is
quite in keeping with, and is perhaps the best example of his perverse
comedies, even if the perversities of this film were not the same as the
original.
I mean, how often can you get to see Katherine Hepburn, Elizabeth
Taylor, Montgomery Clift, and Mercedes McCambridge play over-the-top versions
of themselves? Hepburn is particularly effective as the slightly mad—by film's
end, thoroughly mad—Violet Venable. Descending, via open elevator onto the
set, she begins her conversation before she can even be seen, and exiting her
throne, dives in to a dithering performance wrapped up in her most New Englandy
hauteur, endlessly repeating herself just to hear the intonations, apparently,
of her melodramatic reading of the text:
Strictly speaking, his life
was his occupation. Yes, yes, Sebastian was
a poet. That's what I meant
when I said his life was his work because
the work of a poet is the
life of a poet, and vice versa, the life of a poet
is the work of a poet. I
mean, you can't separate them. I mean, a poet's
life is his work, and his
work is his life in a special sense.
Recovering from his 1956 car crash, Montgomery Clift, with a now grimacing, reconstructed face—and who, in reality was now reliant on drugs and alcohol—stumbles through his role with an over-serious demeanor that often makes us wonder whether he has lost his way into an earlier film such as A Place in the Sun or I Confess. The long scenes were so exhausting for him that the director had to cut after every couple of shots before moving on. But then, any viewer might share the same experience in this monologue-driven frenzy. I had seen the film, fortunately, several times earlier, so it did not destroy my comprehension to break up the long retellings of past history on which this film depends in order to give myself short breaks.
Dr. Curkowicz, as performed by Clift, is so dense-headed ("What do
you mean, by 'using people?' What do you mean by 'bait?'") that one
wonders whether, by film's end, if he has really put together the facts that
Sebastian is a gay man who has used his cousin Catherine and before that, his
own mother, as a decoy to attract young men. It is almost as if the doctor
himself had undergone one of his own lobotomies.
A few years earlier, of course, Clift might well have played the
beautiful Sebastian, whose face we never see in Mankiewicz's movie. No wonder,
perhaps, that Mrs. Veneable confuses him with her son at film's end. So badly
treated was Clift by director and producer, rumor has it, that once she had
spoken her last line and was assured her services were no longer needed,
Hepburn spit into Mankiewicz's face!
Mercedes McCambridge gets to play the greedy, empty-minded Mrs. Grace
Holly, pouring southern syrup upon her gravel-throated voice in a way that she
had last attained in 1954's Johnny Guitar.
In this film she is a delight as a clumsy-footed loon told by son, daughter,
and doctor over and over again to "shut up."
Is it any wonder that Mrs. Venable wants Catherine's "obscene babbling" to be "cut out of her brain" and nearly all others think she is mad? To give her credit, Taylor whips herself up in a proper frenzy through method acting (evidently, she focused on the death of her former husband, Michael Todd), screeching out the final horrific memories she has sublimated for so long. Her performance is also "over-the-top," but one can forgive her that since the story itself is like something from outer-space, all heated up in the white Cabeza de Lobo sun. The understated reaction by the venal hospital administrator to her hysterical-laden history reaches the heights, almost, of camp: "There's every possibility that the girl's story is true!"
In a strange way, however, Williams' story was on target, for certainly
he had chosen the right metaphor for the consumerism in which Sebastien and his
partners engaged. Using a kind of bait-and-switch "come on" to
attract "customers," the beautiful man in white paid boys for the use
of their bodies; their decision, accordingly, to pay him back by fully
consuming him might even be described
as a literalizing of what he sought. For isn't capitalism, by nature, a kind of
cannibalistic act?
Los Angeles, March 25, 2012
Reprinted from International Cinema Review (March 2012).
.png)
No comments:
Post a Comment