Mankiewicz's overwrought film doesn't do the play justice but it's worth it when you have Elizabeth Taylor and Katharine Hepburn going at each other, leaving Montgomery Clift's doctor a mere onlooker.
Hepburn is fantastic as the possessive Mrs Venable, offering to bankroll Clift's hospital providing he lobotomize hysterical niece Taylor, the only witness to her son's death "suddenly last summer..."
Taylor looks magnificent and gives us full 'star' acting, but it's in her quieter moments that she really delivers; her manic scenes show off her vocal limitations too much.
Taylor demanded Clift play the doctor but only three years after his near-fatal car crash, he is a hesitant, stumbling shadow of his former self.
For all it's flaws, unmissable!
Shelf or charity shop? Katharine Hepburn was so disgusted with Mankiewicz's on-set bullying of shaky Montgomery Clift that when he yelled 'cut' on her very last scene, she asked him if that was definitely her last moment on the film, when Mankiewicz said it was she spat in his face. One to keep but living in the limbo of my plastic DVD box. It's worth keeping for the crazed cameo of comedy harridan Rita Webb as a knitting asylum inmate!
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