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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?

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