A Raisin in the Sun is about a Black Chicago family whose tensions and frustrations are exacerbated by the claustrophobic tenement flat where three generations live on top of one another—with a shared bathroom in the hall. Hansberry’s groundbreaking play, the first by a Black woman to open on Broadway, tackles housing discrimination, abortion, and generational conflicts, embedding these issues in the texture and rhythms of daily life. In the film, scenes unfold in long takes and medium shots that keep most of the players in the frame, including those on the sidelines; we are forced to stay in the middle of the family’s anguished arguments and confrontations, aware of every reaction, perspective, and shifting current of feeling. The film preserves almost the entire cast of the original Broadway production: Sidney Poitier at his most electric, kinetic, and furious; Ruby Dee in a devastating portrait of quiet, worn-down stoicism; and Claudia McNeil as the tree-of-life matriarch. The camera grants an intimacy the stage could not, letting us see the tear-tracks and winces, for instance in a lacerating exchange between Poitier’s character and his mother, when he tells her that money is life. “Once freedom was life, now it’s money,” she sighs, to which he bitterly retorts, “It was always money, we just didn’t know it.”
If A Raisin in the Sun calls for unvarnished simplicity in its presentation, Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly, Last Summer demands a combination of baroque style and straight-faced conviction. Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1959 film manages to preserve the play’s allusions to incest, rape, homosexuality, and cannibalism, as the lushly lurid story moves between insane asylums and a New Orleans mansion set in a jungle garden (shot in a London studio). The home’s doyenne, Violet (Katharine Hepburn), descends upon guests via a cage elevator, seated in a flowing gown and chattering like a demented goddess. References to flesh-eating are seeded throughout, from the garden’s Venus flytrap to a gruesome story of birds devouring baby sea turtles to the accusation that Violet and her son, Sebastian, “fed on life.” Violet wants to lobotomize her niece Cathy (Elizabeth Taylor), to stop her from talking about how her adored son really died the previous summer. The whole play revolves around this absent character, variously described as a martyr and a predator, saint and sinner, pure poet and decadent cynic. If Sebastian did appear, could anyone possibly have played the role? Perhaps, in his younger days, Montgomery Clift—but by this point substance abuse and ill health made him barely employable, and his friend Taylor got him the part of the kindly doctor who helps the traumatized Cathy. His fragility, unexplained by the text, adds an intriguing wobble to the script’s overwrought contrivance.
Six years earlier, Clift was at his pinnacle in From Here to Eternity, playing Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt, a proud and stubborn soldier who endures bullying for his refusal to join the division boxing team. Director Fred Zinnemann was determined to cast Clift, finally telling Cohn (who wanted Aldo Ray for the part) that he would not do the film without him. One can’t blame Cohn for being dubious: with his delicate beauty, sensitivity, and slouchy, rail-thin build, Clift was no one’s idea of a boxer or a military man. But while plenty of actors could project toughness and integrity, no one else had the inner radiance that convinces us of Prewitt’s quiet strength, the soul that seems to shine through his eyes like a diamond.
The film is a sprawling ensemble piece about an army unit in Hawaii in the days leading up to Pearl Harbor. It was shot in black and white to save money, but the choice was fortunate, keeping attention on the actors instead of the colorful splendor of beaches and loud Hawaiian shirts. The screenplay by Daniel Taradash divides its time between Prewitt, Sergeant Warden (Burt Lancaster)—embroiled in an adulterous, surf-splashed affair with his commanding officer’s wife (Deborah Kerr)—and the irrepressible, hotheaded Maggio (Frank Sinatra, in a vibrant performance that revived his slumping career). But Prewitt is by far the richest character, a man of rare talent whose deepest principles of individualism and conscience (“A man don’t go his own way, he’s nothing”) are in terminal, self-destructive conflict with his devotion to the army, which demands adherence to the group and obedience to the rules. Clift decided that the way to play Prewitt, whom he considered “a limited man of unlimited spirit,” was to give away as little as possible, and he trimmed his own dialogue and underplayed dramatic scenes, resulting in a performance whose force is channeled through a narrow opening, like the pure wail of the bugle he plays.
Burt Lancaster said that when he filmed his first scene opposite Clift, it was the only time in his career that he could not stop his knees from shaking: “He had so much power, so much concentration.” Clift worked out, studied boxing and bugling, and forged a close, bibulous friendship with James Jones, who had based his novel partly on his own experiences in the army. To obtain cooperation from the military and permission to film on location in the Hawaiian barracks, Columbia agreed to soften Jones’s harsh critique: where the movie’s despicable Captain Holmes is forced to resign for encouraging the hazing of Prewitt, the book’s equivalent is promoted.