Suddenly, Last Summer

Cate1.5

Without me, he died last summer. That was his last summer poem. I usually love Maggie Smith and Natasha Richardson but their New Orleans accents here, you haff to laff. The sound design does its best to drown them out with cicadas, rattlesnakes, tropical parrots – to no success. Everything feels small; you could produce the text using one location like this and make it work as claustrophic and inescapable. Here, it just feels cheap. It doesn't help that the 1959 film is so iconic – maybe you need midcentury actors to do justice to the melodrama of Williams' text; the camp hysteria, the tortured sincerity. Without those kind of performers, it's all a bit limp and ridiculous.

saint judas fonda2.5

Maggie kinda out gags Hepburn but Natasha is no Liz Taylor, and out of kindness I wont even talk about whatever the fuck Rob Lowe is doing, yesh!

mariomovieboy2.5

It has been a while since I last saw the original movie but this feels like a condensed version. Staged as if it were a play, there are no sudden flashbacks to last summer’s action on the beach in Cabeza del Lobo. Except for occasional lapses in the southern accent, Smith is just right in the role of Violet Venable but no one can make an entrance descending inside an elevator like Katherine Hepburn.Lowe is fine. He doesn’t have much to do, not much to say and doesn’t have to put on a Southern accent.Richardson’s Catherine has the most dialogue, often looks more like a silent screen star and to me gives the strongest performance. She tells the story of what happened and then suddenly the film is over. She LOUDLY says the word “procured” to make sure we know what her part was in helping Sebastian obtain younger men.Not a great production but makes me want to do a comparison watch with movie.Also, not the most positive presentation of a gay character, but was always taken with this spoilery synopsis from the book The Celluloid Closet by Vito Russo:Tennessee “Williams’ tortured view of a failed homosexual artist and the people he victimizes with his abnormal desires is a classic horror story. Having first used his mother… than his cousin… as bait for his affairs, the creature is finally destroyed by an angry mob of street urchins in a climax not much different from that of James Whales’s Frankenstein, in which the peasants pursue the monster to the top of the hill, where fire engulfs him.”Aired as an episode of Great Performances, S21|Ep10 Jan 6, 1993.