This BBC adaptation of the famous Tennessee Williams play "Suddenly Last Summer" (NOTE: no comma in the on-screen title credit) captures the morbid nature of the artist's conception -painting intricate word pictures of awful, horror movie images. It's Maggie versus the late Natasha, whose morbid death made it even harder to watch than I expected.
It has many themes, mainly about repression, adding to the horror genre aspects. But as the tale unfolded, with Williams' uncensored inclusion of racist and anti-Semitic tropes left intact (that is, the Jewish tailor who altered dead Sebastian's clothing to fit lanky in-law Richard E. Grant, and the black native boys who assaulted and ate poor Sebastian) this play is quite dated and lacks its original shock value.
Instead, my mind wandered to the too-obvious similarities to Pasolini's life and demise -he's the poet Maggie talks of in rapturous memories of her late son, and his fate as the iconic "cruising" homosexual, murdered and run over with his own car by a different class (caste) young man he picked up are too close for comfort.
Also dated is the theatrical ploy of arificial confrontation and revelation. I always wonder at the ongoing peculiar popularity of Aaron Sorkin's "A Few Good Men", with Rob Reiner's film version playing endlessly on TV, probaly seen more times by fans than Cruise's action hits thanks to that single courtroom scene of him inciting Nicholson's famous outburst. So too, the Natasha revelation of what really happened to Sebastian and Maggie's violent reaction (you can almost hear stage manager whisper: "Curtain!") ends the drama. It reminds me of the thrill of the Jeanne Eagels version of "The Letter", that early silent film essentially crossed out by the Bette Davis classic remake. It ends with Eagels' famous line, delivered so emphatically and dramatically, and suddenly, the movie is over -at a peak note.
That's the way, uh huh uh huh, I like it.
It has many themes, mainly about repression, adding to the horror genre aspects. But as the tale unfolded, with Williams' uncensored inclusion of racist and anti-Semitic tropes left intact (that is, the Jewish tailor who altered dead Sebastian's clothing to fit lanky in-law Richard E. Grant, and the black native boys who assaulted and ate poor Sebastian) this play is quite dated and lacks its original shock value.
Instead, my mind wandered to the too-obvious similarities to Pasolini's life and demise -he's the poet Maggie talks of in rapturous memories of her late son, and his fate as the iconic "cruising" homosexual, murdered and run over with his own car by a different class (caste) young man he picked up are too close for comfort.
Also dated is the theatrical ploy of arificial confrontation and revelation. I always wonder at the ongoing peculiar popularity of Aaron Sorkin's "A Few Good Men", with Rob Reiner's film version playing endlessly on TV, probaly seen more times by fans than Cruise's action hits thanks to that single courtroom scene of him inciting Nicholson's famous outburst. So too, the Natasha revelation of what really happened to Sebastian and Maggie's violent reaction (you can almost hear stage manager whisper: "Curtain!") ends the drama. It reminds me of the thrill of the Jeanne Eagels version of "The Letter", that early silent film essentially crossed out by the Bette Davis classic remake. It ends with Eagels' famous line, delivered so emphatically and dramatically, and suddenly, the movie is over -at a peak note.
That's the way, uh huh uh huh, I like it.