D: Joseph L. Mankiewicz. S: Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams. Play: Tennessee Williams. P: Sam Spiegel. Cast: Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, Katherine Hepburn, Albert Dekker. UK dist (DVD): Sony.

In Suddenly Last Summer,a typically overwrought Tennessee Williams melodrama, Deep Southern undercurrents of sexual unease cause a high-calibre cast to behave like narcoleptic RADA students. Katherine Hepburn, on fine quaveringly aristocratic form, is the bereaved matriarch unable to come to terms with the abrupt death (suddenly, last summer…) of her beloved son and poet Sebastian, whose name, occupation and waspish character should tip you off to one of the play’s big surprises later on. Sebastian was holidaying at the time with his cousin Catherine (Elizabeth Taylor), who promptly suffered a hysterical breakdown and has been swiftly and quietly transferred to a cloistered retreat to be cared for by nuns. The nuns have had enough of her violent temperament and alleged erotomania, however, and she’s to be transferred to a state asylum, there to suffer a prefrontal lobotomy – unless kindly neurosurgeon Montgomery Clift can get the bottom of her broiling neurosis and discover exactly what happened “suddenly, last summer”…

An enjoyable drinking game can be conceived, whereby everyone takes a shot whenever a cast member utters the film’s title – they’d all be wrecked before the halfway point. But this is really a film to be watched only by those who can greet its near-cartoonish artsi-fartiness with a wry smile and an occasional snort of amusement, recognising that the author hasn’t simply failed to replicate reality but has instead aimed to transcend it utterly. Suddenly Last Summer takes itself with an immense, poker-faced seriousness, its psychosexual revelations presented on an escalating scale of hysteria as the music score rages and cowers in the foreground. On one level, this sort of thing could almost be dismissed as high camp, with everybody striking poses, arching eyebrows and making poetical declamations at the drop of a mint julep…but the overheated, hyper-stylised mood does have an undeniable cumulative effect, and few viewers will be able to resist its intoxicating charm.

Director Joseph L. Mankiewicz (All About Eve, Cleopatra) manages the tricky job of keeping the proceedings just the right side of absurdity, and rewards the appreciative viewer with the heart-stopping spectacle of Liz Taylor (never more gorgeous) in a clinging white bathing suit leaving little even to this reviewer’s depraved imagination. Oddly enough, this beach flashback appears to have influenced another beach flashback sequence in none other than Dario Argento’s Tenebrae (1982), which includes a number of striking similarities: a semi-clad female kneeling submissively in the sand, the pursuit and group assault of a white-trousered man whose face is never seen. And there’s the sustained unreality of the unfolding narrative to take into account, too, not a million miles from Argento’s own attempts to forge a highly distorted filmic universe. Perhaps Tennessee Williams, and not Hitchcock, Lang or Antonioni, will turn out to be Argento’s true mentor? (Discuss, 20 marks.)