Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Year Released: 1959
Rating: 2.0
Katharine Hepburn wants hysterical niece Elizabeth Taylor lobotomized (!) because of the information she has "repressed" regarding Hepburn's "poet" son in this adaptation of Tennessee Williams' play. Montgomery Clift is the world-famous surgeon who specializes in the neurosurgery, and needs the money Hepburn wants to donate to his mental hospital. In the late 50's it was obviously shocking, containing and discussing the taboos of madness, promiscuity, incest and homosexuality, but today the hush-hush "allusions" to such matters - and, indeed the armchair psychology employed by Williams - seem tame and commonplace. Psychosurgery has thankfully come a long way since the full-frontal lobotomy, and sadly this film seems to be left in the dust; common understandings about the brain and Freudian suppression turn Williams' subject matter into dated nonsense. Indeed, it also appears to be too flamboyant, both in speech and behavior - Taylor tells Clift, outright, that she's "insane," in one scene, whereas Hepburn, chewing scenery and twitching like the mad bat she is, demands that her niece be lobotomized ("I hope it will be done tomorrow," she implores, heedless of ethics or morality). Honestly, I can't praise a picture where I kept coming up with alternative ways for it to play out - why didn't Hepburn just arrange to have Taylor killed (she has the money) rather than go through the surgical process? Embellished to no end, it does not "hold up" the way Cat on a Hot Tin Roof does (I "bought" Taylor's flamboyance in that film adaptation) or A Streetcar Named Desire.
