Trivia / Suddenly, Last Summer

• Billing Displacement: First billed Elizabeth Taylor first appears 34 minutes into the movie.
• Creator Backlash:
  • This was not a happy production for Katharine Hepburn. It kept her from her lover, Spencer Tracy who was critically ill at the time (years of drinking, smoking and pill-popping were starting to take their toll), she disliked the way Joseph L. Mankiewicz was favoring Elizabeth Taylor and treating Montgomery Clift, and she hated the film's final shot of her which was done in harsh light without make-up.
  • Gore Vidal criticized the ending which had been altered by Mankiewicz, adding "We were also not helped by ... those overweight ushers from the Roxy Theatre on Fire Island pretending to be small ravenous boys." Mankiewicz himself blamed the source material, describing the play as "badly constructed ... based on the most elementary Freudian psychology."
• Disowned Adaptation: Despite being credited for the screenplay, Tennessee Williams denied having any part in writing it. He thought Elizabeth Taylor was miscast as Catherine, telling Life in 1961 "It stretched my credulity to believe such a "hip" doll as our Liz wouldn't know at once in the film that she was 'being used for something evil.'" He also told The Village Voice in 1973 that the film went too far afield from his original play and "made [him] throw up."
• Method Acting: After the climatic scene in which Catherine recalls Sebastian's death, Elizabeth Taylor fell into hysterics and couldn't stop crying. She had been drawing on her grief from the recent death of her husband Mike Todd to act out the scene.
• Reality Subtext: The play's strongly anti-lobotomy partly comes from Creator/Tennessee Williams witnessing what a lobotomy did to his beloved sister, Rose. The message also draws on the practice's use during its heyday as a form of conversion therapy against LGBT people; Williams himself was gay, and targeted the already-controversial practice for this reason as well.
• Troubled Production: As a result of a May 1956 car crash near the home of Elizabeth Taylor and her then-husband Michael Wilding, Montgomery Clift had become heavily dependent on drugs and alcohol. When he was unable to find a doctor willing to attest to his insurability, producer Sam Spiegel approved his casting and went ahead with filming anyway. Clift found the long scenes exhausting and had to have his longest scene shot in multiple takes, one or two lines at a time. His shaky performance led Joseph L. Mankiewicz to ask Spiegel several times to replace the actor. Most of the crew were sympathetic toward Clift, but Katharine Hepburn was especially resentful of the poor treatment to which Mankiewicz subjected him. Indeed, Hepburn found Mankiewicz's conduct so unforgivable that as soon as he called the final "cut" of the film, she asked him to confirm that her services were no longer required, and when he did, she spat in his face. Sources differ as to whether she also spat in Spiegel's face.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Patricia Neal played Violet Venable to so much acclaim on the London stage she was sure she would be given the part in the movie adaptation, even without her agent promoting her for the job. She then woke up in shock to find Elizabeth Taylor had been assigned the role. Marilyn Monroe also lobbied for the part.
  • Vivien Leigh rejected the role of Violet Venable before Katharine Hepburn was cast.
  • Peter O'Toole did a disastrous screen test for Dr. Cukrowicz. In fact it went so badly, when O'Toole was in the running for the lead in Lawrence of Arabia, producer Sam Spiegel didn't want anything to do with O'Toole again.

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