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 Columbia’s Golden Era
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A Raisin in the Sun
Directed by Daniel Petrie • 1961 • United States
Starring Sidney Poitier, Claudia McNeil, Ruby DeeLorraine Hansberry’s immortal “A Raisin in the Sun” was the first play by a black woman to be performed on Broadway. Two years later, the production came to the screen, directed by Daniel Petrie. T...
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Picnic
Directed by Joshua Logan • 1955 • United States
Starring William Holden, Kim Novak, Betty FieldWilliam Holden and Kim Novak make sparks in this torrid adaptation of William Inge’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play. Holden is the handsome stranger who drifts into a small Kansas town to visit an old fr...
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Born Yesterday
Directed by George Cukor • 1950 • United States
Starring Judy Holliday, Broderick Crawford, William HoldenJudy Holliday pulled off one of the greatest upsets in Oscar history when she beat out both Bette Davis in ALL ABOUT EVE and Gloria Swanson in SUNSET BOULEVARD for the Academy Award for bes...
