SILENT MOVIE 1976

Were I to try to pinpoint the origin of my lifelong indifference to silent films, my best guess would be my traumatized reaction to the opening sequence of that '60s TV show Silents Please, when I was just an impressionable tyke. Silents Please was a half-hour TV program highlighting films and stars of the silent era. It ran in reruns on Sunday afternoons, but never, it seems, at scheduled times I could avoid. It always popped up as a time-filler following a football game or (most terrifyingly) at night when I least expected it.
I don’t recall ever seeing an entire episode all the way through, for each episode began with a startling command from an unseen announcer intoning "Silents Please!" (a pun I didn’t appreciate then and don’t appreciate now), which was my cue to high-tail it out of the living room before the unspooling of the opening montage of silent movie clips which featured a quick “reveal” of Lon Chaney in full The Phantom of the Opera drag. It scared the hell out of me. The nightmares it inspired kept even comic silent movies off my radar for much of my childhood, an antipathy that stayed with me well into maturity.

The Three Silent Stooges
Dom Bell (Dom DeLuise), Mel Funn (Mel Brooks), and Marty Eggs (Marty Feldman)

In later years, when I was going to film school, my wholesale disinterest in classic films of the silent era made me a majority of one among my peers. I saw and studied a great many silent movies in Film History class, but in the end, I remained impressed, yet unmoved. I appreciated what they were able to achieve with no dialogue and such low-tech equipment, but I never responded to the films themselves, finding the silence to be distancing, not engaging.

It was during these college years that Mel Brooks released Silent Movie, a contemporary silent film fashioned as a Hollywood spoof and affectionate homage to the films of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Mack Sennett, and Hal Roach. Child of '70s cinema that I am, naturally, this was the first silent film I remember ever taking a liking to. 

Touted as the first feature-length silent film to be made in over forty years, 20^th Century Fox released Silent Movie at the height of Mel Brooks’ popularity. Following the blockbuster success of Brooks’ western spoof Blazing Saddles and his horror spoof Young Frankenstein, former television gag writer Mel Brooks was hailed by critics and audiences alike as the king of motion picture comedy. Rather remarkably, both films (directed and co-written by Brooks) came out in the same year. At the close of 1974, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein occupied the  #1 and #4 slots, respectively, on the list of the year's top boxoffice moneymakers.
Prior to his late-blooming emergence as the comic voice of the '70s, my only familiarity with Brooks was as the writer/director of one of my favorite comedies - The Producers (1967); the co-creator of one of my favorite TV shows - Get Smart; and for that 2000 Year Old Man skit he performed with Carl Reiner that I never really thought was all that funny. Anyhow, by the mid-'70s, EVERYBODY was talking about Mel Brooks, and at 50 years of age, he was suddenly a hit with the hip, college crowd. Naturally, with such a high degree of success, Brooks could virtually write his own ticket when it came to his next film. Sort of.

When Brooks announced his follow-up project was to be a silent film, the natural assumption was that it was to be a film in the vein of its predecessors—a period-accurate recreation of a 1920s-era silent film with doses of irreverent, slightly raunchy, contemporary comedy. Perhaps because director Peter Bogdanovich had already begun production on his own comic film set in the early days of silent movies (Nickelodeon - 1976), Brooks opted to make a contemporary silent film set in the Hollywood of 1976. Its objective: to poke fun at the motion picture industry and gently spoof the comedies of yesteryear. 

Vilma Kaplan: A Bundle of Lust
Bernadette Peters, in what could be called the Madeline Kahn role, as the seductress
hired by Engulf & Devour to corrupt Mel Funn

Since Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein had each successfully launched two of the most valuable players in the Mel Brooks repertory off into careers of their own (Gene Wilder and Madeline Kahn), their inability to participate in Brooks' follow-up project was a hurdle audiences were eager to see if Brooks (casting himself in his first lead role) could surmount.

Silent Movie’s premise casts Mel Brooks as Mel Funn, a once brilliant movie director whose career has hit the skids due to alcoholism. Hoping to make a comeback, Funn pitches his idea of making a modern-day silent movie to the head of Big Pictures Studio (Sid Caesar). After initially rejecting the suggestion, the failing studio, desperate for a hit to avoid a takeover by NY conglomerate Engulf & Devour, relents after Mel promises he can fill his movie with big-name stars. Funn, with the help of his two associates Bell & Eggs (DeLuise & Feldman), thus embarks on a slapstick quest to secure the biggest names in Hollywood for his new silent movie.

Art Imitates Life
Silent Movie actually spoofs Mel Brooks' real-life efforts to get a studio
 interested in his making this silent movie

As a follow-up to the phenomenon that was Young Frankenstein, the level of anticipation and expectation surrounding the release of Silent Movie was both its blessing and its curse. Folks expecting the envelope-pushing effrontery of Blazing Saddles or the technically impeccable lunatic genius of Young Frankenstein were forced to content themselves with a genial, sometimes hilarious, mostly hit-and-miss comedy that delivered a good time, but not really much else.
There were gentle jibes at silent movies (verbose exchanges translated in terse title cards); satirical jabs at the movie business (a sign on an executive's door reads "Current Studio Chief"); and sight gags galore. But it was all rather safe and old-fashioned. In fact, none of the jokes would have looked out of place on a typical episode of Get Smart, which had gone off the air in 1970.

When Mel falls off the wagon, his friends embark on a search for him, accompanied by the usual cliché dissolves of neon-lit nightspot signs. Only this time capped with a Brooks-ian touch of the unexpected

People went to see Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles multiple times, wanting to relive favorite comic moments or catch bits of business they missed the first time out (having seen both films in theaters when they came out, I can attest that laughter was often so frequent and prolonged, you always missed hearing half the movie). Conversely, Silent Movie was a pretty straightforward affair. All the laughs are accessible, obvious, and intentionally broad. Much in the same way that suspense in a horror film can be sustained even after multiple viewings, while “gotcha” scare moments in horror are effective only once; Silent Movie’s funny but unsubtle slapstick and vaudeville-level mugging didn’t invite a lot of repeat business. 

While failing to live up to the success of its predecessors, Silent Movie was nevertheless a sizable hit, ranking #11 on boxoffice charts at the close of the year. Citing the silent movie angle as more gimmick than legitimate satirical target, critical and popular opinion varied as to the relative merit of the enterprise as a whole. Most willing to forgive the film's elemental inconsequence in favor of applauding what clearly was a labor of love for Brooks, an affectionate valentine to the comics and style of comedy that inspired him in his youth.

Sid Caesar as The Studio Chief
Mel Brooks got his start as one of the staff writers for Caesar's 1950s
variety program, Your Show of Shows

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I’m from the generation raised on Laugh-In-style blackout comedy. I remember when it was business as usual for corny variety shows to encourage their movie star guests to “let their hair down” in groan-inducing, out-of-character skits and musical numbers. I grew up at a time when stand-up comics all had Vegas-y, faux chummy/hilarious names like Shecky, Totie, Marty, Sandy, and Morty.

In short, I came from the era that produced Mel Brooks.

Hilarious in 1976, but meh in 2015
Now that ALL major movie studios are owned by conglomerates, this jab at the 1967 acquisition of Paramount by Gulf & Western Industries barely rates a smile 

Because my personal comedy tastes run towards the cornball and old-fashioned, I was perhaps less disappointed than many when Silent Movie came out and proved to be a film so tame it could have been made before The Producers. But even I had hoped for something more, even while acknowledging that Brooks’ experiment with the genre was largely successful and good for a few laughs...not particularly memorable, retold over the water cooler at work, laughs...but laughs.

With composer John Morris' excellent wall-to-wall score of jaunty, amusingly responsive music; a hyperactive grab bag of exaggerated sound effects; and its non-stop barrage of sight gags, blackout skits, and slapstick physical comedy, Silent Movie is as much a send-up of those old Warner Bros. cartoons as it is a take-off on silent-era comedies. 

"Poverty Sucks!" - "Yea for the Rich!"
Ron Carey as Devour / Harold Gould as Engulf

PERFORMANCES

With Silent Movie, Mel Brooks’ usually behind-the-scenes talents (with the occasional voiceover or cameo) are, for the first time, placed front and center, and, at least for me, the movie suffers for it. Brooks is an undeniably funny writer, gagman, and skit performer, but he’s no actor. And I don't think I ever grasped or appreciated how significant a role a good comic actor plays in making a motion picture work (Gene Wilder is the all-time best) until I watched what happened when a talented Catskills standup comic cast himself as a leading man. 

As an actor, Brooks is very much in line with the borscht belt comic Ernie Bernie (Sid Gould) from the TV show That Girl, or the woefully schticky comic played by Johnny Haymer in Annie Hall. They do bits of familiar comedy business and make with the funny faces, but they don't know how to bring a character to life. For me, Brooks is the worst thing in the film. As cute as he is, every moment he's on is like when you're at an office party, and the boss comes in trying to show you what an average Joe he is. Brooks plays his material almost like he's patting himself on the back for coming up with it.

Mel Brooks is too likable to actually spoil the film for me, but his lack of...what is it, lunacy? Abandon?...seems to have the effect of muting the talents of Feldman and DeLuise. As much as I admire Mel Brooks as a comedy genius, as far as I'm concerned, Mel Brooks' films only began to suffer after Mel Brooks began starring in them.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
The star cameos in Silent Movie are a great deal of fun and were a major part of the attraction when the film was released (remember, this was the era of the disaster film; star casting was all the rage). Back in the 1970s, it was exhilarating to see these celebrities poking fun at their images. Now, I watch these sequences filled with a great deal of nostalgia. Not just because so many of its performers are no longer with us, but because the supporting cast is also brimming with familiar faces. Comics, character actors, and TV personalities whose faces you recognize, but whose names you often don't know.

Ranking of celebrity cameos. Favorite to least-favorite:

1. Surrounded by gigolos, Anne Bancroft (Mrs. Mel Brooks for any youngsters out there) looks to be having a great deal of fun playing herself as a haughty movie star (she was the original choice to star in Mommie Dearest, and would have been great). Not only does she get to dance, but she dazzles us with her ability to cross her eyes...one at a time! 

2. Oddly enough, Burt Reynolds' egotistical movie star bit plays much funnier now than it did in 1976. Back in the '70s, Burt was something of a male Jayne Mansfield and seemed to be on everything from Hollywood Squares to Johnny  Carson, nonstop. In each instance, overworking the "egotistical star" bit to death. Fresh off the flop Lucky Lady with Liza Minnelli, Reynolds was nevertheless a really hot property at the time, with two other films in release in 1976 and Smokey and the Bandit just a year away.

3. Liza Minnelli, the star I most wanted to see in a Mel Brooks movie, is pretty much wasted in a segment requiring her to do little but react to the slapstick antics of Brooks, Feldman, and DeLuise (or their stunt doubles). Decked out in a costume from her Vincente Minnelli-directed flop-to-be A Matter of Time and rebounding from the debacle that was Lucky Lady, the Cabaret star wouldn't appear in another hit movie until 1981's Arthur. And she was only the co-star in that one!

4. What's Marty Feldman looking at there? Tough guy James Caan plays off his macho but dumb image in a brief physical comedy sequence involving an off-balance dressing room trailer. The sequence is cute, but doesn't have much impact.

5. A wheelchair-bound Paul Newman, looking ridiculously gorgeous at 50, spoofs his love of auto racing by leading Mel and his associates on a high-speed chase. Once again, an amusing sequence, but so reliant on stunt doubles, Newman winds up making a cameo in his cameo.

6. The use of legendary French mime Marcel Marceau in a silent movie is inspired and provides the film with one of its biggest laughs. But I'm afraid his brief sequence (whimsically involving walking against the wind to answer a phone) only reminds me of how simultaneously terrifying and annoying mimes can be.


THE STUFF OF DREAMS 

I don’t pretend to know how or why comedy works, but I know that a great many fondly remembered sequences from comedies work well for me precisely because they are silent. I’m no fan of Jerry Lewis, but his 1960 directing debut, The Bellboy, is a favorite because he keeps his mouth shut in it for all but the last scene. And while no one should be deprived of hearing Peter Sellers repeating“Birdie num num” over an intercom system, Blake Edwards’ The Party (1968) is at its most uproarious when it’s silent.

Clip from "Silent Movie" 1976

When it comes to updates of the silent movie, Mel Brook’s Silent Movie doesn’t come anywhere near approaching the comic eloquence and grace of Michel Hazanavicius’ Oscar-winning silent film The Artist (2011); but Brooks gets points for being the first out of the gate and for succeeding in achieving what I honestly think were his modest goals. He made a funny little movie that said “Thank you” to the silent comics and filmmakers who inspired him to become a comedy legend himself. 

As for me, know that while I’ve grown fonder of silent movies over the years (Metropolis-1927, and Nosferatu (1922) are favorites), I’ve still yet to garner the courage to watch  Lon Cheney's The Phantom of the Opera.

THE AUTOGRAPH FILES

I worked at a Honda dealership for a time in 1979, and Mel Brooks came in to the service department to pick up his car. I remember asking a co-worker for permission to temporarily hijack his job (escort the customer to his car) so I could talk to Brooks for a while and get his autograph.

BONUS MATERIAL
Here's the intro to the TV program, Silents Please.  I guess I scared easily as a kid.

Copyright © Ken Anderson    2009 - 2015

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.

The Pollitts of Mississippi

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, in sharing so many common themes, they might as 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 some of 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.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opened in Los Angeles
 on Friday, August 29, 1958

One of Williams’ more accessible films is Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. His 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning play was 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. Suffice it to say, family patriarch, Big Daddy, is dying, and the kinfolk tie themselves in knots trying to avoid any number of truths--both emotional and financial--that the finality of his impending death makes necessary to confront.

Maggie the Cat, Brick, Big Momma, Big Daddy, and 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 that 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 as it can) were layers yet to be revealed to me.

Larry Gates as Dr. Baugh

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.

Vaughn Taylor as Deacon Davis

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 was about 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 featured in several of the comedy program'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 never found those cool blue eyes of his capable of 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, in social context, 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 defined by being closed off and living lives of pretense and reality avoidance. 
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 the marriages-of-convenience rumors that follow the uncommonly long showbiz marriages of gossiped-about stars like Newman and Woodward.

Madeleine Sherwood (whom 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 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!"), I've yet to see a Maggie i like better. 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) who had a history of knowing what appealed to popular tastes. 

Williams did so with open eyes. But once a show proved successful because of these changes, he berated himself with feelings of compromise and self-betrayal (all the way to the bank). Williams' self-recriminations habitually led him to make a great show of giving self-serving statements to the press about how he was forced to compromise his principles 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 (continuing the trend of casting mono-expression actors with gossiped-about sexuality), Laurence Olivier, and 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. 

Standing in front of what I sincerely hope is a giant cake in the shape of a cat on a roof, Elizabeth Taylor appears to be getting instruction on feline behavior from director Richard Brooks.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2015