No blushing here
by chuckofish
I am reading Jeremiah these days and it is just too relevant to our world today.
Were they ashamed when they committed abomination?
No, they were not at all ashamed;
they did not know how to blush.–Jeremiah 8:12
Speaking of blushing, I watched a movie which I had DVR’d on TCM–Suddenly Last Summer (1959)–which seems all too apropos for our time. I had not seen it since I saw it on television long ago as an adolescent who really had no idea what was going on. I understand now what all the sturm and drang was about, dreamed up by Tennessee Williams and adapted for the screen by Gore Vidal.
The plot centers on Catherine Holly, a young woman who, at the insistence of her wealthy aunt, is being evaluated by a psychiatric doctor to receive a lobotomy after witnessing the death of her cousin Sebastian Venable while traveling with him the previous summer. Elizabeth Taylor stars as Catherine and Katharine Hepburn co-stars as her aunt, the mother of the dearly departed Sebastian. They compete outrageously throughout for the over-acting prize while Montgomery Clift lurks nearby as the surgeon who has been engaged to do the lobotomy, looking as if he is concentrating hard on remembering his lines. Of course it takes place in New Orleans. There is even a Venus Fly-trap symbolizing fill-in-the-blank. Thankfully, the doctor has his doubts about who is the actual crazy person and (spoiler alert) it all works out in the end.
It must have been pretty shocking back in 1959 and not surprisingly it did quite well at the box office, but I have to agree with the New Yorker critic who called it “a preposterous and monotonous potpourri of incest, homosexuality, psychiatry, and, so help me, cannibalism.”
Now, of course, all that incest, homosexuality and cannibalism is perfectly normal and we church-going types are the “weird” ones. C’est la vie.
Funnily enough (or not) no one won any Oscars that year for Suddenly Last Summer. It was the year of Ben-Hur…but what a hilarious selection of Best Actress nominees!
I would have voted for Doris Day.
dual personalities 
I know you’re a fan, but Doris Day for Pillow Talk? Zut alors!
I don’t normally engage in a comments section argument, but I have to say that this comment strikes me as exactly what a certain type of competent woman faces all the time.
I guess we can’t take Doris seriously as an actress because Pillow Talk is a comedy? And a comedic actress can’t win or doesn’t deserve a best actress Oscar? The film won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay!
In a year filled with melodramatic female roles, Doris was not only playing against type in Pillow Talk, she was offering a refreshing break from the other films in the category!