ABSTRACT
Based on the play by Tennessee Williams, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1959 film, Suddenly, Last Summer, outlines a double narrative: the traumatic death of Sebastian Venable and the psychotherapy of his cousin, Catherine Holly (Elizabeth Taylor). Through analysis, Dr. Cukrowicz (Montgomery Clift), a psychiatrist from Chicago specializing in lobotomies, helps Catherine to remember the events leading up to her cousin’s death. Catherine, her mother, and her brother George, are poor relations of Sebastian’s wealthy mother, Violet Venable (Katharine Hepburn), and the story suggests that Sebastian, a gay man, used first his mother and then Catherine as “bait” to attract young men in Europe. The film remains rather vague about how exactly this transaction works, but the magnetic sexual appeal of Catherine and Violet somehow translates into gay sex for Sebastian.1 After Catherine is raped at a Mardi Gras ball, Sebastian invites her to take Violet’s place in their summer travels. Traveling in Europe the summer before the film begins, Catherine witnesses the death of Sebastian, who is killed and cannibalized by hungry young boys in a Spanish town called Cabeza de Lobo. Seeking to suppress the story of Sebastian’s death (and the desire that seems to have led to it), Mrs. Venable promises Dr. Cukrowicz the funds for a new mental hospital in return for lobotomizing Catherine. Dr. Cukrowicz, however, champions a talking cure for Catherine. The film
ends with her recounting the story of Sebastian’s death, an apparently curative catharsis for Catherine that leaves Mrs. Venable to lapse into madness.
