Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (DVD)

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I have to admit that of all of America's great playwrights, I've always found Tennessee Williams the most distant from my own way of life. I mean, compared to, say, Arthur Miller or Eugene O'Neill, Williams' characters seem to me to inhabit another planet. The women are faded Southern belles, Southern floozies, or Southern princesses; the men are ineffectual drunks, creeps, or brutes. Not that that's all bad; it's just different from my experience and most of the people I've met. But I can't argue that these folks aren't entertaining as all get out, especially the ones in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," like Maggie ("the Cat"), Brick, Gooper, and Big Daddy. At the very least, you could always count on Williams for great character names and great titles ("A Streetcar Named Desire," "Baby Doll," "The Night of the Iguana," "The Glass Menagerie," "A Rose Tattoo," "Orpheus Descending," "Summer and Smoke").

Williams called "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" a study in mendacity, and certainly everyone in the story lies in one way or another. He wrote the play in 1955, and it became an enormous, Pulitzer Prize-winning hit on Broadway, but he was said to have disliked the 1958 movie version we have here because it eliminated any hint of the homosexuality that underlined one of the character's motivations. Well, that was Hollywood for you in the 1950s and before.

There is a lot less thematic depth to Williams' plays than to the works of Miller or O'Neill, but Williams' characters have such emotional depth that audiences don't seem to notice or mind. Certainly, in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" the characters and their relationships with one another are the end-all of the drama. The screenplay was co-written and directed by Richard Brooks, whose films were almost always rooted in strong characterizations: "Blackboard Jungle," "Elmer Gantry," "Sweet Bird of Youth," "Lord Jim," "In Cold Blood," "Looking for Mr. Goodbar," that kind of thing.

And you couldn't ask for better actors and actresses in the main roles: Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman, Burl Ives, Jack Carson, Judith Anderson, Madeleine Sherwood. They're terrific, even if it's Ives, a holdover from the stage production, who steals the show as Big Daddy. He's nothing short of perfection, and his penultimate scene is a heartbreaker.

The story begins at Big Daddy Pollitt's sixty-fifth birthday party, an occasion for the gathering of the Pollitt clan at Big Daddy's antebellum-style, Mississippi mansion. Big Daddy is a grumpy, hateful old codger, very rich and very powerful. He dominates everyone around him, and his inability to express any kind of warmth or love provides one of the movie's central turning points. But more than the birthday party, the family has gathered to find out if the old man is going to live or die. He's dying presumably of cancer (although it's never mentioned in the film, the subject of cancer apparently being another of those taboo subjects that Hollywood's self-imposed censorship code forbade, along with sex and profanity and excess violence and a ton of other stuff we take for granted today). It's clear from the beginning, however, that the family is more interested in who will inherit Big Daddy's lands and money than in wishing him well. Interestingly, too, Burl Ives was only in his late forties when he did the role, and the singer/actor would continue to perform for the next thirty years or more.

Newman and Carson play Big Daddy's two sons, Brick and Gooper. Brick is a drunken ex-football star, now sullen and uncommunicative, who says he can't stand his wife and does everything he can to ignore and avoid her, including sleeping on the sofa. They have been married three years and are childless, clearly a misdemeanor or sorts among the Pollitts. Gooper is the older son, a spineless lawyer with an obnoxious wife (Sherwood) and a half dozen equally obnoxious kids, all of them eager to get their hands on the old man's millions.

Taylor plays Maggie "the Cat" Pollitt, Brick's wife. Like everyone else in the story, she appears to harbor secrets. But is she as wicked as Brick implies, or is she the only person in the family with spine, gumption, heart, soul, and life? For Taylor, the role was another stepping stone in her transition from child star to adult award-winner, going on to do "Suddenly Last Summer," "BUtterfield 8," "Cleopatra," "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," "The Taming of the Shrew," and other mature works.