CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF 1958

I’ve always been a sucker for playwright Tennessee Williams’ overheated Southern gothics.
By the time most of the films adapted from his plays began airing regularly on late-night TV, Williams’ trademark psychoanalytic, sweat ‘n’ lust domestic melodramas—so popular in the '40s and '50s—had long gone out of fashion. But watching these movies as a kid gave me the impression of adulthood as this distant, mysterious wonderland where one’s life would be ruled by fiery passions, profound psychological epiphanies, and turbulent emotions. Where people with the simplest, most unassuming countenances concealed deep wellsprings of insight and poetic sensitivity. Ah, youth.

Admittedly, I couldn’t always distinguish actual Tennessee Williams movies from look-alike works from William Inge (Come Back Little Sheba), Eugene O’Neill (Desire Under the Elms), Carson McCullers (The Member of the Wedding), Lonnie Coleman (Hot Spell), or William Faulkner (The Long Hot Summer). But, as each of these films seemed to me to reinforce such similar themes, they might well have sprung from the same imagination.

Maggie- "Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you—gently, with love, and hand your life back to you. Like something golden you let go of—and I can! I'm determined to do it—and nothing's more determined than a cat on a hot tin roof—is there? Is there, baby? " 

The Emotionally Unavailable Man

When I was young and my entire world not much larger than the size of my family, I responded to the way Williams’ domestic dramas gave the mundane conflicts of the American household the scope and grandeur of Greek tragedy. In my adolescence, I related to his characters’ flawed humanity and struggle with self-forgiveness. In my teens, when I grew more aware of the hormonal drives propelling Williams’ narratives, I was fascinated by the way he introduced implicit and codified homosexual longing—inevitably tortured—through characters seen (Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof); unseen (Blanche’s husband in A Streetcar Named Desire); male (Sebastian in Suddenly, Last Summer); and female (Karen Stone in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone).

In young adulthood, when illusions of maturity come cloaked in the fragile armor of sarcasm and cynicism, I discovered camp humor and found much to jeer and scoff at in the more outdated aspects of Williams’ oeuvre. Particularly the quaint notion of what was considered to be "steamy" material by 1950s Hollywood standards. 

I also think it was around this time that I became hooked on those brutally trenchant “Family” skits on The Carol Burnett Show. So well-written and so over-the-top, these acerbic episodes of familial dysfunction were like mini-operatic satires of everything I liked so much in the whole Southern Gothic movie genre. Those skits had the effect of rekindling my love for Tennessee Williams and his ilk by reminding me that it was possible to both appreciate the sensitivity of human drama and still have a good chuckle over some of the dated, southern-fried histrionics.  

Elizabeth Taylor as Margaret (Maggie) Pollitt 

Paul Newman as Brick Pollitt

Burl Ives as Big Daddy

Judith Anderson as Ida "Big Momma" Pollitt

Jack Carson as Gooper "Brother-Man" Pollitt

Madeleine Sherwood as Mae "Sister-Woman" Pollitt

Changing times and shifting social attitudes have sapped many Tennessee Williams film adaptations of much of their initial profundity for me, leaving in its place a kind of winsome nostalgia for a time when Williams’ ennobling of the outcast and defense of the delicate-of-spirit proved the perfect balm for my adolescent insecurities. But the richness of his characters, the poetry of his language, and the finely observed details of domestic tension that comprise so many of his works still have the power to enthrall. And if every so often I find his works lapse into campiness…well, these days that only serves to sweeten the experience.

One of Williams’ more accessible films is Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. His 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning play adapted for the screen (Williams would probably say bowdlerized) by director Richard Brooks (Looking for Mr. Goodbar) and screenwriter James Poe (They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?). Parodied, imitated, and discussed to a fare-thee-well, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and the saga of the Mississippi Pollitts—a family of epic dysfunction long before such a term existed—is too familiar to warrant a summary, save to say family patriarch Big Daddy is dying, and the kinfolk tie themselves in knots trying to avoid any number of truths that the finality of his impending death makes necessary to confront.

Maggie the Cat, Brick, Big Momma, Big Daddy, Gooper & Mae and their troop of little no-neck monsters all occupy a short list of Williams characters so colorfully drawn and finely realized onscreen; just their names alone evoke images of real-life, flesh-and-blood beings with lives which extend beyond the celluloid frame. Not all of Williams’ characters strike me this way, but to this list, I’d add Blanche DuBois, Stanley Kowalski, and Sebastian Venable; the latter whom I've always been able to picture, plain as day, in spite of his never being shown.

"They've brought the whole bunch here like animals to display at a county fair."
Monster of Fertility Mae Pollitt (nee Flynn) and Her Brood of No-Necks

I think Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is the very first Tennessee Williams-based film I ever saw. Certainly, coming as I do from an extended family arguably as dysfunctional and just a shade more Machiavellian, it’s the first Tennessee Williams movie I actually “got.” Which is to say, at my young age, I was able to follow what was going on without actually grasping any of its insights. Themes like the dual nature of lying—that it can be used to protect and harm; the useless self-destructiveness of guilt; the relativity of love and truth; and the indomitability of the self-preservation instinct (aka, that cat staying on the tin roof as long it can) were layers yet to be revealed to me.

Like those shiny shells the surf leaves on the beach that require minimal effort to spot and pick up, the things that most entertained me about Cat on a Hot Tin Roof were primarily on its surface. For example, I loved the simplicity of the setup: over the course of one long, hot summer day (I learned early that there's no such thing as a winter in a Southern Gothic), members of an estranged and at odds family are forced to interact and put on a good face on the occasion of Big Daddy's 65th birthday. Possibly his last.

Shot in a slick, glossy style, cast with appealing actors giving stirring performances, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is an enjoyable finger-lickin', family-size, southern-fried fracas with overlays of Freudian psychology. As often as not, the characters lie to each other with the same alacrity with which they lie to themselves, and when not repressing some deep, dark secret, are usually pressing forth some hidden agenda. Resentments, revelations, and epiphanies flow as freely as the bourbon from Brick's bottomless booze bottle, while unsure southern accents clash musically in the background. It's great stuff that I've come to appreciate more as I've grown older.

Mendacity Manor

I saw Cat on a Hot Tin Roof long before I was aware of the Hollywood Production Code-mandated excision of all references to homosexuality from Williams’ original play. This likely annoyed the hell out of those familiar with the play, but to me, the movie version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof always came across like every other overly coy, repressed-yet-obsessed-with-sex ''50s-era movie I'd ever seen. Another one of those movies that never shuts up about the very thing it isn't allowed to speak of. 

I thought the entire hubbub in the movie surrounded Brick's belief that Maggie slept with his football buddy, Skipper, a man whom Brick, feeling unloved by Big Daddy, held up as a hero. That's it. I never picked up on any gay subtext beyond the fact that Paul Newman was impossibly gorgeous, but I did find all that evasive dialogue maddening. A sizable chunk of my early memories of watching Cat on a Hot Tin Roof on TV is scene after scene of characters proffering endless variations on: “Don’t say it, Maggie!”, “I’m gonna talk about it!”, “Tell him! Go on, tell him the truth!”, "It’s got to be told!”, "First, you've got to tell me!"

Yeesh! Just say it already!

"When a marriage goes on the rocks...the rocks are there, right there!"

The anthology TV program, Love, American Style was still on the air the first time I saw Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. An identical brass bed was featured in several of the comedy show's episodes and black-out skits (above) contributing to my feeling that sections of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof played out like an episode titled "Love and the Deep Dark Secret" 

I also remember being distracted by Paul Newman’s largely immobile, insanely photogenic face. Easy on the eyes as he is, he goes through the entire film with but a single, all-purpose expression: smoldering insouciance. Sure, he's playing a character all bottled up and cut off, and perhaps my biggest complaint might be rooted in how the character is conceived in the first place; but even with all that taken into consideration, I don't find those cool blue eyes registering very much. Every close-up looks like the same GQ Magazine cover. I guess they didn't call him "Brick" for nothing.

Winner of the Keanu Reeves/Kristen Stewart/Sean Combs one-face-fits-all Sphinx Award

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Over the years, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof has been restored to Williams’ preferred version in any number of permutations (two are linked in the Bonus Materials section below). But, as gratifying as it is to finally see the entire play as it was originally intended, the film version remains my favorite.
Why?
Because even at its most frank, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a seriously closeted play. Nearly 2½ hours are devoted to a man turning himself inside out over the "shameful" prospect that he might be gay. Another man kills himself over the fact. I recognize that as the work of a repressed playwright in a repressed era, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is daring and groundbreaking as hell, but contemporary actors tackling this material today always come across as rather forced and false. They tend to over-emote and practically burst blood vessels portraying characters who are motivated by pretense and a need to play things close to their vest.
My feeling is that if I’m going to enjoy a work of closeted art, there’s something to be said for seeing it with all its repression intact.

The movie version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof feels every inch a product of the 1950s. It’s an uptight, skirting-the-issue kind of movie that was made and takes place within the very era that created the closet-case Bricks and Skippers of our society. In some odd, meta kind of way, there is something perfect about Paul Newman starring in a movie dealing with latent homosexuality, which, in its telling, leaps through hoops and fire in an effort to avoid even mentioning the word. The drastic alterations Cat on a Hot Tin Roof underwent to make it to the screen still communicate Williams' themes pretty accurately, while subtextually giving the nod to the real-life Bricks and Maggies of Hollywood and those marriages of convenience rumors that follow the uncommonly long show-biz marriages of gossiped-about stars like Newman and Woodward.

Madeleine Sherwood (who I only knew as Reverend Mother on The Flying Nun) and Burl Ives
 (who will always be Sam the Snowman from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer) recreated
the roles they originated on Broadway

PERFORMANCES
What makes Cat on a Hot Tin Roof so re-watchable for me are its performances. Everyone delivers and is in fine form (even Newman, the immovable Brick, has his moments). The feel of a great ensemble cast is captured in the easy, familiar way in which the characters interact, and happily, the screenplay affords each at least one moment to shine. Madeleine Sherwood and Jack Carson are letter-perfect and major scene-stealers. I particularly delight in Sherwood's southern accent and single-minded, Lady Macbeth-ish maneuvering.

"One more crack, Queenie..."

Although he gave a near-identical performance that same year in the film version of Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms, Burl Ives is perhaps my all-time favorite Big Daddy. And while my vote for favorite Big Momma has to be split evenly between Maureen Stapleton and Kim Stanley (in the 1976 and 1984 TV movie versions, respectively), Judith Anderson's atypically refined interpretation of the character is surprisingly moving.

And then we come to Elizabeth Taylor. Given how many of her films have made their way onto this blog, it should come as no surprise that her Maggie the Cat is the central reason why Cat on a Hot Tin Roof has been a favorite of mine for all these years. For me, it really isn’t a matter of how well she embodies the character Tennessee Williams created (the screen Maggie is less tense, catty, and consumed with a clawed-her-way-up-from-nothing fear of poverty); it's that she succeeds in making Maggie both the heat and life force of the film.
Taylor is vivid and so celestially beautiful in the role, Brick doesn't come off as troubled so much as having rocks in his head. His heterosexual disinterest in her seems so unlikely that Cat on a Hot Tin Roof reclaims Williams' inked-out gay subtext without even trying. 

Taylor's third husband, Mike Todd, was killed
in a plane crash three weeks into the film's production

Even with that questionable southern accent of hers (“I caint! I caint!"), no one (at least no one I've seen in the role so far) can touch Elizabeth Taylor's Maggie. In this film she's more than a jewel; she’s the entire crown.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
It’s no secret that Tennessee Williams didn't care for the film version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but Williams, like a lot of artists conflicted by a desire for legitimacy and popular success, tended to hedge his bets after the fact. Williams had a habit of willingly complying with requested alterations to his text put forth by directors (Elia Kazan, most explosively) with a history of knowing what appealed to popular tastes. Williams did so with open eyes, but once a show proved successful because these changes were made, he berated himself with feelings of compromise and self-betrayal (all the way to the bank). Williams' self-recriminations habitually led to his making a great show of giving self-serving statements to the press about how he was forced to compromise his principles in order to satisfy provincial sensibilities (John Lahr’s exceptional biography Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh recounts this pattern of behavior in delicious detail.)

Virtually the entire third act was rewritten for the film. Among the changes: a sentimental
backstory for Big Daddy, and a father and son reconciliation

Certainly, the film version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof thoroughly subverts the entire theme of Williams’ play, but given his run-ins with the censors and Hollywood Production Code during the making of A Streetcar Named Desire six years earlier, one wonders what else he possibly could have expected. Exactly what he got, it seems, for the half-million dollars he accepted from MGM for the rights to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof proved to be his guilt-ridden deal with the devil.

"I do love you, Brick. I do!"

"Wouldn't it be funny if that were true?"

Above is how Cat on a Hot Tin Roof's last scene might have played out had the film kept Williams' original ending. But for the movie version, Hollywood knew that after 108 minutes of sexual advance and retreat, audiences would have torn down the theater if these two beautiful specimens weren't granted their hard-won happy ending.

BONUS MATERIAL

The 1976 made-for-TV adaptation of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof starring Natalie Wood, Robert Wagner, Laurence Olivier, & Maureen Stapleton. (Features the Broadway ending.)

The 1984 made-for-TV adaptation of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof starring Jessica Lange, Tommy Lee Jones, Rip Torn, and Kim Stanley, features Williams' preferred "original" ending, restored text, and at a running time of almost 2 ½ hours, is the most complete filmed staging to date. 

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2015