Wealthy harridan Violet Venable (Katharine Hepburn) attempts to bribe Dr. John Cukrowicz (Montgomery Clift), a young psycho-surgeon from a New Orleans, Louisiana mental hospital that is desperately in need of funds, into lobotomizing her niece, Catherine Holly (Dame Elizabeth Taylor), to prevent the girl from defiling the memory of her cousin, Violet's poet son Sebastian (Julián Ugarte). Catherine has been babbling obscenely about Sebastian's mysterious death that she witnessed while they were vacationing together in Spain the previous summer.—alfiehitchie