Suddenly, Last Summer Page #2

Synopsis: A wealthy harridan, Violet Venable, attempts to bribe Dr. Cukrowicz, a young psycho-surgeon from a New Orleans mental hospital that is desperately in need of funds, into lobotomizing her niece, Catherine Holly. Violet wants the operation performed in order to prevent Catherine from defiling the memory of her son, the poet Sebastian. Catherine has been babbling obscenely about Sebastian's mysterious death that she witnessed while on holiday together in Spain the previous summer.
Production: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
  Nominated for 3 Oscars. Another 4 wins & 4 nominations.
 
IMDB:
7.6
Rotten Tomatoes:
69%
APPROVED
Year:
1959
114 min
1,820 Views


dies of hunger.

The Latin names to the plants

are printed on tags...

...attached to them,

but the print's fading.

Those ones there are

the oldest plants on earth.

Survivors from the age

of the giant fern forest.

And here's my poor Lady.

They never get away.

The Lady exudes

this marvelous perfume...

...which attracts them.

They plunge into her chalice.

And they never come out.

This operation

you perform is called...?

Lobotomy.

-That's an unusual...

-I hate these flies.

Foxhill!

Foxhill!

She loves feeding our wicked Lady.

Foxhill's rather a brute.

Such an extravagance, really,

from early fall to late spring...

...Lady must be kept under glass...

...we have to provide her with flies

flown in at great expense.

Foxhill, you do the honors.

-Lady's very hungry today.

-Of course, Mrs. Venable.

I've never seen an insectivorous

plant before. What is it called?

The Venus's-flytrap.

A devouring organism...

...aptly named

for the goddess of love.

What was your son's work?

I mean, aside from this garden.

As many times as I've had

to answer that question...

...it still shocks me

a little to realize...

...that Sebastian Venable the poet

was quite unknown...

...outside of a small coterie

of friends, including his mother.

Your son was a poet?

Strictly speaking,

his life was his occupation.

Yes. Yes, Sebastian was a poet.

That's what I meant when I said

his life was his work.

Because the work of a poet is

the life of a poet. And vice versa.

I mean, you can't separate them.

I mean, a poet's life is his work.

And his work is his life,

in a special sense.

-Are you all right?

-Right as rain, however right that is.

This operation of yours,

does it really work?

Yes, yes, it does.

However, it is very experimental.

I was struck by something

you said in the paper.

About the sharp knife in the mind.

That kills the devil in the soul?

I'm afraid I got a bit carried away.

No, what you said

was almost poetic itself.

Mrs. Venable, the work

of a doctor is his life too.

But we need help, particularly

in a field as experimental as mine.

Particularly at a state hospital

like Lions View.

Yet we have little money,

practically none.

Yes, I know.

Doctor...

...I have a niece by marriage...

...at a place called St. Mary's.

I've heard of it.

It's a custodial home for the insane.

She suffers from something

called dementia praecox.

Dementia praecox?

Which is to say, she's mad

as a hatter, poor child.

Would you like to

see Sebastian's studio?

It's at the end of the jungle

in what used to be the garonnire.

That's an old

New Orleans convenience.

A place where the young men

could go to be private.

You're not from New Orleans?

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Gore Vidal

Eugene Luther Gore Vidal (; born Eugene Louis Vidal; October 3, 1925 – July 31, 2012) was an American writer and public intellectual known for his patrician manner, epigrammatic wit, and polished style of writing.Vidal was born to a political family; his maternal grandfather, Thomas Pryor Gore, served as United States senator from Oklahoma (1907–1921 and 1931–1937). He was a Democratic Party politician who twice sought elected office; first to the United States House of Representatives (New York, 1960), then to the U.S. Senate (California, 1982).As a political commentator and essayist, Vidal's principal subject was the history of the United States and its society, especially how the militaristic foreign policy reduced the country to a decadent empire. His political and cultural essays were published in The Nation, the New Statesman, the New York Review of Books, and Esquire magazines. As a public intellectual, Gore Vidal's topical debates on sex, politics, and religion with other intellectuals and writers occasionally turned into quarrels with the likes of William F. Buckley Jr. and Norman Mailer. Vidal thought all men and women are potentially bisexual, so he rejected the adjectives "homosexual" and "heterosexual" when used as nouns, as inherently false terms used to classify and control people in society.As a novelist Vidal explored the nature of corruption in public and private life. His polished and erudite style of narration readily evoked the time and place of his stories, and perceptively delineated the psychology of his characters. His third novel, The City and the Pillar (1948), offended the literary, political, and moral sensibilities of conservative book reviewers, with a dispassionately presented male homosexual relationship. In the historical novel genre, Vidal re-created in Julian (1964) the imperial world of Julian the Apostate (r. AD 361–63), the Roman emperor who used general religious toleration to re-establish pagan polytheism to counter the political subversion of Christian monotheism. In the genre of social satire, Myra Breckinridge (1968) explores the mutability of gender role and sexual orientation as being social constructs established by social mores. In Burr (1973) and Lincoln (1984), the protagonist is presented as "A Man of the People" and as "A Man" in a narrative exploration of how the public and private facets of personality affect the national politics of the U.S. more…

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