Suddenly, Last Summer (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1960)

Suddenly, Last Summer is a film with a rare distinction: Both Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor received Oscar nominations as best actress for their performances in it. Only two other movies have that distinction: Bette Davis and Anne Baxter were nominated as best actress for All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950) and Anne Bancroft and Shirley MacLaine for The Turning Point (Herbert Ross, 1977). That none of the six won may suggest that they split the votes: In the case of Hepburn and Taylor, the winner was Simone Signoret for Room at the Top (Jack Clayton). Pardon this excursion into Oscar trivia, but I think it says something about the film that these two performances are the most memorable thing about it -- and not always for the right reasons. The only other nomination it received was for the art direction and set decoration of Oliver Messel, William Kellner, and Scott Slimon. There were none for Joseph L. Mankiewicz's direction or for the screenplay credited to Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams. In fact, Williams had nothing to do with the film, and according to John Lahr's fine biography, Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, he later called it "an abortion." It was Vidal, then, who accomplished the task of expanding Williams's one-act play into a two-hour film. What Vidal and Mankiewicz actually accomplish is a kind of parody of Williams's style at its most florid. They take the film beyond the play's single setting in the jungle-like hothouse and dilute and dissipate the intensity of the play's great scenes for Catherine and Mrs. Venable (Hepburn). Vidal himself regretted the decision to film the attack on Sebastian, which in the play is only described by Catherine, but it's likely that producer Sam Spiegel insisted on showing Taylor in her revealing white bathing suit.  Hepburn at this point in her career couldn't help being a collection of familiar mannerisms -- the haughty head-tilt, the reedy vocal production -- but she holds the screen like no other actress. Taylor, however, fails to evoke Catherine's vulnerability and she begins her great final narrative on too high a pitch, then has to sustain it to the point of shrillness. Montgomery Clift, as the doctor who tries to resist Mrs. Venable's attempt to eradicate Catherine's memories with a lobotomy, is clearly a damaged man, suffering the effects of alcohol and drugs after his near-fatal car crash in 1956, but Taylor was insistent on casting him, over Mankiewicz's objections, which continued well into filming. Taylor and Hepburn both mothered him, and they resented Mankiewicz's sometimes harsh treatment, to the point that, according to several accounts, when Hepburn finished her final scene she spat at the director. For a glimpse at what Suddenly, Last Summer can be in other hands, check out the 1993 BBC version of the play with Maggie Smith (an actress with her own distinct mannerisms who knows how to use them in service of the character) and an astonishing performance by Natasha Richardson.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Mike Nichols, 1966)

I don't know if Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a great play -- I've never seen it -- but it's not a great movie, perhaps because it sticks so closely to an uncinematic source. What it does have is one great performance, Richard Burton's, and one near-great one from Elizabeth Taylor. Unfortunately, George Segal and Sandy Dennis are miscast as Nick and Honey: He's too hip and she's too rabbity for their roles to take dramatic shape. Ideally, I think, Nick and Honey should be the conventional flies lured into George and Martha's sinister web. But as Mike Nichols directs them, they don't bring enough initial squareness to their parts, so their disintegration during the game-playing of their hosts happens too swiftly. What makes Burton's performance so memorable is his ability to shift moods, from sullen to mocking, from beleaguered to triumphant, in an instant. He also quite brilliantly suggests George's only barely latent homoerotic attraction to Nick, making it clear that he's titillated by the very idea of Martha's sleeping with the younger man. Taylor falters only in letting her Martha get too shrill for too long: A slower crescendo to her shrewishness would have been welcome in many scenes. Oscars went to Taylor and Dennis, but Burton lost to Paul Scofield in A Man for All Seasons (Fred Zinnemann, 1966) and Segal to Walter Matthau in The Fortune Cookie (Billy Wilder, 1966). Oscars also went to Haskell Wexler for black-and-white cinematography, Richard Sylbert and George James Hopkins for black-and-white art direction and set decoration, and Irene Sharaff for black-and-white costuming. This was the last year in which these categories were divided into color and black-and-white. It's sometimes observed that except for Cimarron (Wesley Ruggles, 1931), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is the only film to have received nominations in every category for which it was eligible. But it's likely that if the color/black-and-white division had been eliminated a year earlier, the film would have been shut out of some of these categories. Though he was a noted cinematographer, Wexler doesn't do his best work on Virginia Woolf, partly because Nichols, making his directing debut, called on him to do some close-up shots that not only don't hold focus but also distract from the essence of the drama, the interplay of its four characters. Nominations also went to Ernest Lehman as the film's producer and screenwriter, Nichols as director, George Groves for sound, Sam O'Steen for film editing, and Alex North for score. Oh, and if you're wondering why the title is sung to "Here We Go 'Round the Mulberry Bush" instead of "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?", essentially killing the joke, it's because the Disney studios, who owned the rights to the tune, wanted too much money.