american consumers
by Douglas Messerli
Tennessee
Williams and Gore Vidal (screenplay, based on the play by Tennessee Williams),
Joseph L. Mankiewicz (director) Suddenly,
Last Summer / 1959
There's a wonderful moment in Willard
Carroll's excellent film comedy, Playing
by Heart, when an acting teacher responds to yet another rendition of Catherine's
monologue in Suddenly, Last Summer:
"If one more actress saunters into this class and recites Catherine's 'Native
boys ate Sebastian' speech, I am going to puke." Angelia Jolie, playing
Joan, who is about to do precisely that, escapes from the room in horror.

Strictly speaking, his life
was his occupation. Yes, yes, Sebastian was
a poet. That's what I meant
when I said his life was his work because
the work of a poet is the
life of a poet, and vice versa, the life of a poet
is the work of a poet. I mean, you can't
separate them. I mean, a poet's
life is his work, and his
work is his life in a special sense.
With "A is B because B is A"
logic, Mrs. Veneable sweeps across rooms, sits, stands, sweeps again, and pulls
Dr. Cukrowicz (the forlorn, slightly drugged out Montgomery Clift) into her
primordial garden where, in perfect gothic comedic form, she feeds flies to her
Venus Fly Trap. No drag queen could play her better!
Recovering from his 1956 car crash, Montgomery Clift, with a now grimacing,
reconstructed face—and who, in reality was now reliant on drugs and
alcohol—stumbles through his role with an over-serious demeanor that often
makes us wonder whether he has lost his way into an earlier film such as A Place in the Sun or I Confess. The long scenes were so
exhausting for him that the director had to cut after every couple of shots
before moving on. But then, any viewer might share the same experience in this
monologue-driven frenzy. I had seen the film, fortunately, several times
earlier, so it did not destroy my comprehension to break up the long retellings
of past history on which this film depends in order to give myself short
breaks.
A few years earlier, of course, Clift might well have played the
beautiful Sebastian, whose face we never see in Mankiewicz's movie. No wonder,
perhaps, that Mrs. Veneable confuses him with her son at film's end. So badly
treated was Clift by director and producer, rumor has it, that once she had
spoken her last line and was assured her services were no longer needed,
Hepburn spit into Mankiewicz's face!
Mercedes McCambridge gets to play the greedy, empty-minded Mrs. Grace
Holly, pouring southern syrup upon her gravel-throated voice in a way that she
had last attained in 1954's Johnny Guitar.
In this film she is a delight as a clumsy-footed loon told by son, daughter,
and doctor over and over again to "shut up."
In a strange way, however, Williams' story was on target, for certainly
he had chosen the right metaphor for the consumerism in which Sebastien and his
partners engaged. Using a kind of switch-and-bait "come on" to attract
"customers," the beautiful man in white paid boys for the use of
their bodies; their decision, accordingly, to pay him back by fully consuming him might even be described as a literalizing
of what he sought. For isn't capitalism, by nature, a kind of cannibalistic
act?
Los
Angeles, March 25, 2012
No comments:
Post a Comment