Neat set decoration on display here as Aunt Violet Venable (Hepburn) takes Dr. Cucrovitz (Clift) on a tour of Sebastian's, her deceased son's, botanical gardens while trying to persuade him to perform a lobotomy on her niece Cathy (Taylor) who is making a nuisance of herself. The indoor gardens are a vast place filled with primitive plants that were once eaten by the dinosaurs -- the first dinosaurs, the herbivorous ones, not the flesh-eating dinosaurs that came later. Aunt Violet demonstrates the feeding of a carnivorous plant, the "aptly name" Venus flytrap, whose diet of live flies must be flown in at considerable expense during the winter months.
Well, to let the cat out of the bag, Aunt Violet promises to fund a new building devoted to psychosurgery at Cucrovitz's underfunded state hospital if only he will do a slice-and-dice number on Catherine's frontal lobes and "cut those lies out of her mind." The lies, as it turns out, aren't really lies. For years, first Aunt Violet and then Catherine acted as bait for attractive young men, whom Sebastian would then seduce -- two tummlers, one replacing the aging other. The operation does not take place.
I don't know about Aunt Violet but Catherine would have made pretty good bait. When we first meet Elizabeth Taylor she is a patient in a psychiatric hospital with a diagnosis of dementia praecox (schizophrenia). She apologizes to Clift for her appearance. They don't let her groom herself. However, she looks okay. Her eyes are properly colored and though her hair is a bit messy and her dress a little drab, she has a magnificent bosom and a face that would light up a room. Clift himself was staggeringly handsome a few years earlier but had since been in a car wreck that ruined his good looks even as it cemented his friendship with Taylor, his co-star in George Stevens' superb "A Place in the Sun." His acting, however, is up to par, despite the fact that by this time Clift was bombed and strung out from morning till night. Can't imagine how he remained so thin.
The story is engaging, no doubt about it. Rich Aunt wants troublesome niece silenced by what amounts to medical murder. Lobotomies are no longer used, having been replaced by powerful and (mostly) effective anti-psychotic drugs. They were pretty brutal anyway, taking away extreme anxiety and the distress associated with terrifying symptoms, but also leaving behind little more than a raw and bleeding stub of the patient's original personality. This film is set in 1937. Two years later, the innovator responsible for lobotomies, Egon Munoz, won a Nobel prize in medicine for it.
There's a problem with the screenplay. Williams' best play was "Streetcar Named Desire." It was studded with short and flowery phrases, sometimes extending into brief, intense monologues. ("Don't you just love these long rainy afternoons in N'Awlins? When an hour's not just an hour but a little piece of eternity dropped into our hands -- and who knows what to do with it?" That's Blanche, just before she puts some moves on a teen aged boy.) In this film the flowery speeches come more often, and they're longer. Only a few minutes into the story and Aunt Violet is carrying on about the baby sea turtles being eaten by birds on the beaches of the Galapagos Islands. Catherine's big Reveal about Sebastian's homosexuality and his recruiting tactics is split into two parts. It's all a bit much, and these long speeches constitute an extreme demand on the performers. Hepburn is up to it because hers is shorter. Taylor gives it her best but it's almost too much and a viewer can sense the effort being put into it, the rising, almost hysterical pitch.
The story lacks Streetcar's sense of place too, the ambiance. Arnold Malcom's scores have done yeoman work in other films, like "The Bridge on the River Kwai," but Streetcar had Alex North's slouching, slightly menacing Southern rhythms and this film needs such support badly. Here we feel uneasily that Aunt Violet should be slashing her way through the jungle behind William Holden.
Well, those speeches may be long and difficult to read out for the audience, but what imagery. And Williams scores some points in the dialog. Sebastian makes a point of producing one poem every nine months, the length of human gestation. Clift: "I hope they weren't hard to deliver." And Taylor has a line about people being like children, trying to spell God's name with the wrong alphabet blocks.
Not Williams' best, but by no means a clunker.
Well, to let the cat out of the bag, Aunt Violet promises to fund a new building devoted to psychosurgery at Cucrovitz's underfunded state hospital if only he will do a slice-and-dice number on Catherine's frontal lobes and "cut those lies out of her mind." The lies, as it turns out, aren't really lies. For years, first Aunt Violet and then Catherine acted as bait for attractive young men, whom Sebastian would then seduce -- two tummlers, one replacing the aging other. The operation does not take place.
I don't know about Aunt Violet but Catherine would have made pretty good bait. When we first meet Elizabeth Taylor she is a patient in a psychiatric hospital with a diagnosis of dementia praecox (schizophrenia). She apologizes to Clift for her appearance. They don't let her groom herself. However, she looks okay. Her eyes are properly colored and though her hair is a bit messy and her dress a little drab, she has a magnificent bosom and a face that would light up a room. Clift himself was staggeringly handsome a few years earlier but had since been in a car wreck that ruined his good looks even as it cemented his friendship with Taylor, his co-star in George Stevens' superb "A Place in the Sun." His acting, however, is up to par, despite the fact that by this time Clift was bombed and strung out from morning till night. Can't imagine how he remained so thin.
The story is engaging, no doubt about it. Rich Aunt wants troublesome niece silenced by what amounts to medical murder. Lobotomies are no longer used, having been replaced by powerful and (mostly) effective anti-psychotic drugs. They were pretty brutal anyway, taking away extreme anxiety and the distress associated with terrifying symptoms, but also leaving behind little more than a raw and bleeding stub of the patient's original personality. This film is set in 1937. Two years later, the innovator responsible for lobotomies, Egon Munoz, won a Nobel prize in medicine for it.
There's a problem with the screenplay. Williams' best play was "Streetcar Named Desire." It was studded with short and flowery phrases, sometimes extending into brief, intense monologues. ("Don't you just love these long rainy afternoons in N'Awlins? When an hour's not just an hour but a little piece of eternity dropped into our hands -- and who knows what to do with it?" That's Blanche, just before she puts some moves on a teen aged boy.) In this film the flowery speeches come more often, and they're longer. Only a few minutes into the story and Aunt Violet is carrying on about the baby sea turtles being eaten by birds on the beaches of the Galapagos Islands. Catherine's big Reveal about Sebastian's homosexuality and his recruiting tactics is split into two parts. It's all a bit much, and these long speeches constitute an extreme demand on the performers. Hepburn is up to it because hers is shorter. Taylor gives it her best but it's almost too much and a viewer can sense the effort being put into it, the rising, almost hysterical pitch.
The story lacks Streetcar's sense of place too, the ambiance. Arnold Malcom's scores have done yeoman work in other films, like "The Bridge on the River Kwai," but Streetcar had Alex North's slouching, slightly menacing Southern rhythms and this film needs such support badly. Here we feel uneasily that Aunt Violet should be slashing her way through the jungle behind William Holden.
Well, those speeches may be long and difficult to read out for the audience, but what imagery. And Williams scores some points in the dialog. Sebastian makes a point of producing one poem every nine months, the length of human gestation. Clift: "I hope they weren't hard to deliver." And Taylor has a line about people being like children, trying to spell God's name with the wrong alphabet blocks.
Not Williams' best, but by no means a clunker.