Live stream preview

Watch this video and more on The Criterion Channel

Watch this video and more on The Criterion Channel

Start your free trial

Already subscribed? Sign in

Classic Hollywood

Suddenly, Last Summer

1h 54m

Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz • 1959 • United States, United Kingdom
Starring Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, Montgomery Clift

Gay panic, incest, and a sprinkling of cannibalism: Tennessee Williams’s one-act southern-gothic shocker gets an appropriately lurid screen adaptation cowritten by Gore Vidal and Williams himself. Katharine Hepburn is deliciously perverse as a malevolent New Orleans matriarch trying to convince a brain surgeon (Montgomery Clift) to lobotomize her troubled niece (Elizabeth Taylor). But what long-buried traumatic memory is the girl suppressing?

Up Next in Classic Hollywood

  • On the Waterfront
    1:47:59
    On the Waterfront

    On the Waterfront

    Directed by Elia Kazan • 1954 • United States
    Starring Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, Lee J. Cobb

    Marlon Brando gives the performance of his career as the tough prizefighter-turned-longshoreman Terry Malloy in this masterpiece of urban poetry. A raggedly emotional tale of individual failure and soc...

  • A Place in the Sun
    2:02:02
    A Place in the Sun

    A Place in the Sun

    Directed by George Stevens • 1951 • United States
    Starring Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, Shelley Winters

    Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor make for one of the most swoon-inducing screen couples of the 1950s in this deluxe, multi-Oscar-winning adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s AN AMERICA...

  • By the Sad Sea Waves
    10:47
    By the Sad Sea Waves

    By the Sad Sea Waves

    Directed by Alfred J. Goulding • 1917 • United States
    Starring Harold Lloyd, ‘Snub’ Pollard, Bebe Daniels

    It’s trouble on the water when a man tries to woo his sweetheart by pretending to be a lifeguard.

×