Suddenly Last Summer (1959)

Elizabeth Taylor is afraid of something other than Virginia Wolfe, and has to confront her terrible memories by revealing herself to psychiatrist Montgomery Clift, whose terrible performance mostly consists of finding different angles to put his hands in his pockets.

Begur is apparently a small coastal village intriguingly called ‘Wolf’s Head’, ‘Cabeza de Lobo’, where nothing special is happening in 1937, and Taylor’s sensitive poet of a brother Sebastian, whose face we never see, has a run in with some teenagers rehearsing for a casting for ‘Lord of the Flies’.

Taylor follows Sebastian and the boys up to the medieval castle at the top of the hill, where her brother meets his fate, among the castle ruins.

Ten days of filming took place in August 1959, but the film would not be seen in Franco’s Spain until 1979. 

Taylor and her temporary husband Eddie Fisher would take their meals at the Bar Frigola in Begur’s main square those summer days according to Pere Carreras Luque, a local expert who has kept the memory of this and other films alive in Begur. The bar, now a branch of Banco de Sabadell, would be roped off to prevent anyone not connected with the film from approaching, including Pepe, whose love for the cinema started with the visit of La Taylor, but was also conditioned by the fact that his grandfather ran the local cinema, which still shows films.

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