The Furniture: Suddenly, Last Summer and the Dawn of Creation

As a special side dish to our ongoing Montgomery Clift Centennial celebration, The Furniture (our series on Production Design) is looking at one of his most fascinating pictures...

by Daniel Walber

Saint Sebastian had to be martyred twice. Violet Venable (Katherine Hepburn) tells his story with a certain vicious pride, lending her own Sebastian a supernatural authority. The saint was shot full of arrows but survived, miracuously, only to be beaten to death with cudgels. The first death has been depicted by countless artists, a hauntingly beautiful and frequently homoerotic image. The second, meanwhile, is unspeakably violent and ugly. It’s almost forgotten, a brutal footnote to a transcendent aesthetic.

Mrs. Venable’s Sebastian, however, gets it in reverse. As is revealed at the end of Suddenly, Last Summer, he was torn limb from limb under the white hot sun of Cabeza de Lobo. And for what crime? In accordance with the aging Hays Code, it appears to be his homosexuality. But beneath this ultra-thin surface lingers something much darker...

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Monty @ 100: The influential peak of "A Place in the Sun"

We're watching all 17 of Montgomery Clift's films for his centennial. Here's Juan Carlos...

After starring in The Search, Red River, The Heiress, and The Big Lift, all but one of them either a critical or commercial success, Montgomery Clift reached an even great peak in 1951 with George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun. It was the adaptation of a novel and play, both called An American Tragedy, that were in turn inspired by the real-life murder of Grace Brown by Chester Gillette in 1906. The story, already made into a 1931 pre-Code drama as An American Tragedy, took on a life of its own in its 1951 form. A Place in the Sun's now classic tale of doomed romance and class divide proved a crucial success in the careers of all of its key players, winning six Oscars in a tight battle for Best Picture with An American in Paris. 

Shelley Winters stripped herself of the bombshell packaging that the studio system had placed on her and in turn earned her first Academy Award nomination. For Elizabeth Taylor, the film was a key act in her transition from juvenile star to legendary adult star. Meanwhile, the film gave director George Stevens his first Oscar on his second nomination. For Clift, this film, coupled with Marlon Brando’s smolderingly threatening work in Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire released the same year, put The Method into the mainstream leading to an inevitable shift in acting styles in American cinema...

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Almost There: Burl Ives in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"

by Cláudio Alves

In 1958, Burl Ives won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Some cinephiles would, understandably, assume that the great honor came to him as a reward for his legendary turn as Big Daddy in the silver screen adaptation of Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. It wasn't so, however. Burl Ives did indeed win his Oscar for playing the impassioned patriarch of some portentous American clan, but it was for a story set in the arid landscapes of the Far West rather than the humid heat of Mississippi. The winning movie was William Wyler's The Big Country, a sublime epic of its genre whose taste for cruelty is only matched by the lushness of its score. It's not a well-remembered flick despite its quality, and, while great, Ives' supporting turn pales in comparison to what he did as Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof that same cinematic year...

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Almost There: Olivia de Havilland in "My Cousin Rachel"

by Cláudio Alves

As you know, Olivia de Havilland passed away on Saturday. She leaves behind a filmography full of immortal classics as well as a legacy that still shapes the American film industry. At first glance, de Havilland might seem like an odd choice for this series. Her most acclaimed roles did nab Oscar nominations and she won twice. Still, there was, at least, one occasion when the great Olivia could have considered herself snubbed by AMPAS. It happened in 1952 when the actress returned to the screen after a short period dedicated to the stage. Surely a wise move since The Heiress (1949) was undoubtedly a tough act to follow.

Her next feature after the break was a Daphne du Maurier adaptation that's noteworthy for at least two reasons: one, it  launched the career of Richard Burton in Hollywood and two, it went on to score four Oscar nominations. We're talking about My Cousin Rachel…

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Sessue Hayakawa: From sex symbol to Oscar nominee

We've been celebrating 1957 for a couple of weeks. Here's one more from Cláudio Alves

In 1957, Miyoshi Umeki became the first and only Asian woman to win an acting Oscar. However, the Best Supporting Actress champion wasn't the only Japanese performer to score an Academy Award nomination that year. Sessue Hayakawa, who played the ruthless Colonel Saito in the Best Picture winner The Bridge on the River Kwai, became the first male actor of Japanese descent to be nominated by the Academy. Unlike Umeki, who had less than a decade of experience in show business by the time she achieved Oscar glory, Hayakawa had a long history with Tinsel Town. Many decades before his nomination, when the American film industry was creating itself and Silent Cinema was entertainment for the masses, Sessue Hayakawa had been one of the first sex symbols… 

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