CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF 1958lecinemadreams.blogspot.com /2015/09/cat-on-hot-tin-roof-1958.html

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’ trademarkpsychoanalytic, 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 wonderlandwhere one’s life would be ruled by fiery passions and profound emotions. Where where the simplest, mostunassuming countenances concealed deep wellsprings of 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 theWedding), Lonnie Coleman (Hot Spell), or William Faulkner (The Long Hot Summer). But as each film seemed toreinforce similar themes ("Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someoneto take hold of you - gently, with love, and hand your life back to you. Like something golden you let go of."); theymight well have sprung from the same imagination.

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. When I was ateenager and became more aware of the hormonal drives propelling Williams’ narratives, I was excited by hisintroduction of implicit and codified homosexual longing—inevitably tortured—through characters seen (Brick in Caton a Hot Tin Roof); unseen (Blanche’s husband in A Streetcar Named Desire); male (Sebastian in Suddenly, LastSummer); and female (Karen Stone in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone).Young adulthood brought forth in me both a heretofore untapped propensity for supercilious scoffing and anappreciation of camp; two dubious talents put to ample use when confronted by some of the more outdated aspectsof Williams’ oeuvre, and '50s-era Hollywood's quaint notions of what constituted "steamy." I also suspect that thedevelopment of my snide cynicism during this time was at least in part due to my having fallen in love with those brutally trenchant “Family” skits on The Carol Burnett Show. Those hilariously acerbic episodes of familial discordwere so well-written, yet so exaggerated, they forever altered my ability to take the southern gothic genre nearly asseriously as I had in my youth.Life experience and changing times have sapped many Tennessee Williams film adaptations of much of their initialprofundity for me, leaving in its place a kind of winsome nostalgia for a time when Williams’ ennobling of the outcastand defense of the delicate-of-spirit proved the perfect balm for my adolescent insecurities. But the richness of hischaracters, poetry of language, and finely-observed details of familial tension, still have the power to engross. And if

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The Emotionally Unavailable Man

every so often his movies lapse into campiness…well, these days that only serves to sweeten theexperience.

One of Williams’ more accessible films is Cat on aHot Tin Roof, his 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning playadapted for the screen (Williams would saybowdlerized) in 1958 by director Richard Brooks(Looking for Mr. Goodbar) and screenwriterJames 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 theMississippi Pollitts—a family of epic dysfunctionlong before such a term existed—is too familiar towarrant a summary, save to say family patriarchBig Daddy is dying, and the kinfolk tie themselvesin knots trying to avoid any number of truths thefinality of death makes necessary to confront.

Maggie the Cat, Brick, Big Momma, Big Daddy,Gooper & Mae and their troop of little no-neckmonsters, occupy a short list of Williamscharacters so colorfully drawn and finely realizedonscreen; just their names alone evoke images ofreal-life, flesh-and-blood beings with lives whichextend beyond the celluloid frame. Not all ofWilliams’ characters strike me this way, but to thislist I’d add Blanche DuBois, Stanley Kowalski, andSebastian Venable; the latter of whom I've alwaysbeen able to picture, plain as day, in spite of hisnever being shown.

I think Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is the very firstTennessee Williams film I ever saw. Certainly,coming as I do from an extended family arguablyas dysfunctional and just a shade moreMachiavellian, it’s the first Tennessee Williamsmovie I actually “got.” Which is to say, at myyoung age. I was able to follow it. Not necessarilygrasp with insight any of what the film had to sayabout things like, the duality of lying—how peopleuse lies to both protect and to harm; the crippling,self-destructiveness of guilt; the relativity of loveand truth; and the indomitability of the self-preservation instinct, aka that cat staying on the tin roof as long it can.

Like those shiny shells the surf leaves on the beach that require minimal effort to spot and pick up, the things thatmost entertained me about Cat on a Hot Tin Roof were primarily on its surface. I loved the setup: over the course ofa long, hot summer day (I learned early that there's no such thing as winter in southern gothic), a family estrangedand at odds is forced to interact and put on a good face on the occasion of Big Daddy's 65th birthday. Possibly hislast.

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Elizabeth Taylor as Margaret (Maggie) Pollitt

Paul Newman as Brick Pollitt

Beautifully shot, well-cast, and finely acted, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a finger-lickin', family-size, southern-friedfracas with overlays of Freudian psychology. As often as not, the characters lie to each other with the same alacritywith which they lie to themselves, and when not repressing some deep, dark secret, are pressing forth some hiddenagenda. Resentments, revelations and epiphanies flow as freely as the bourbon from Brick's bottomless boozebottle, while unsure southern accents clash musically in the background. It's great stuff that I've come to appreciatemore as I've grown older.

Unaware as I was at the time of the Production Code-mandated excision of all references to homosexuality fromWilliams’ original play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roofcame across like every other overly-coy,repressed-yet-sex-obsessed '50s-era movie:it wouldn’t stop talking about what it couldn’tspeak aloud. I thought the entire hubbub inthe movie surrounded Brick's belief thatMaggie slept with his football buddy, Skipper,a man that Brick, love-starved from BigDaddy's inattention, held up as a hero. That'sit. I never picked up on any homosexualsubtext beyond the fact that Paul Newmanwas impossibly gorgeous. A sizable chunk ofmy early memories of watching Cat on a HotTin Roof on TV are scene after scene ofcharacters proffering endless variations on:“Don’t say it, Maggie!”; “I’m gonna talk aboutit!”; “Tell him! Go on, tell him the truth!”; "It’sgot to be told!”; "First, you've got to tell me!"Yeesh! Just say it already!

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Burl Ives as Big Daddy

Judith Anderson as Ida "Big Momma" Pollitt

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Jack Carson as Gooper "Brother-Man" Pollitt

Madeline Sherwood as Mae "Sister-Woman" Pollitt

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Mendacity Manor

"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

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"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 . Anidentical brass bed was featured in several of the comedy show's episodes and black-out skits (above) contributingto my feeling that sections of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof played out like an episode titled "Love and the DeepDark Secret"

I also remember being distracted by Paul Newman’s largely immobile, insanely photogenic face. Easy on the eyesas 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 is rooted in how the characteris conceived in the first place; but even those cool blue eyes fail to register much. Every close up looks like the sameGQ Magazine cover. I guess they didn't call him "Brick" for nothing.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILMOver the years, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof has been restored to Williams’ preferred version in any number ofpermutations (two are linked in the Bonus Materials section below). But, as gratifying as it is to finally see the entireplay 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 aman turning himself inside out over the shameful prospect that he might be gay. Another man kills himself over thefact. I recognize that as the work of a repressed playwright in a repressed era, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is daring andgroundbreaking as hell; but contemporary actors tackling this material today always seem forced and false. Theyover-emote and practically burst blood vessels portraying characters who are motivated by pretense and a need toplay 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

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Madeline 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

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

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-issuekind of movie that was made and takes place within the very era that created the closet-case Bricks and Skippers ofour society. In some odd, meta kind of way, there is something perfect about Paul Newman starring in a moviedealing with latent homosexuality, which, in its telling, leaps through hoops and fire in an effort to avoid evenmentioning the word. The drastic alterations Cat on a Hot Tin Roof underwent to make it to the screen communicatenot only Williams' themes, but the whispered-about side of Hollywood and those impossibly long marriages ofgossiped about stars like Newman and Woodward.

PERFORMANCESWhat makes Cat on a Hot Tin Roof sore-watchable for me are theperformances, all of which arestandouts. Everybody is in fine form(even Newman as the immovableBrick, has his moments). The feel of agreat ensemble cast is captured in theeasy, familiar way in which thecharacters interact and, happily,Williams' play and the screenplayaffords each with at least one bigmoment to shine.Madeline Sherwood and Jack Carsonare letter-perfect and a lot of fun. I

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"One more crack, Queenie..."

particularly find Sherwood's southern accent and single-minded, Lady Macbeth-ish maneuvering to be a constantdelight.Burl Ives is perhaps my all-time favorite BigDaddy, although I suspect the effect of hisperformance was undermined somewhat in1958 by his giving an almost identical one inDesire Under the Elms earlier the same year.And while my vote for favorite Big Mommahas to be split evenly between MaureenStapleton and Kim Stanley (in the 1976 and1984 TV-movie versions, respectively),Judith Anderson's atypically refined take onthe role is surprisingly moving.

And then we come to Elizabeth Taylor. Given how many of her films have made their way onto this blog, it shouldcome as no surprise that her Maggie the Cat is the central reason why Cat on a Hot Tin Roof has been a favorite ofmine for all these years and only gets better with time. For me it really isn’t a matter of how well she embodies thecharacter 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 so celestially beautiful and appealing in the role, Brick doesn't come off troubled so much as having rocksin his head. Ironically, as rumors of Paul Newman's probable bisexuality began circulating after his death, this filmedversion of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof reclaimed all the gay subtext it fought so hard to lose.

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

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

Even with that questionablesouthern accent of hers (“I caint!I caint!") no one (at least no oneI've seen in the role so far) cantouch Taylor's Maggie. In thisfilm she's more than a jewel;she’s the entire crown.

THE STUFF OF DREAMSIt’s no secret that TennesseeWilliams didn't care for the filmversion of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof .But Williams, like a lot of artistsconflicted by a desire forlegitimacy and popular success, tended to hedge his bets after the fact. Williams had a habit of willingly complyingwith suggestions put forth by directors (Elia Kazan, most explosively) with a history of knowing what appealed topopular tastes. Williams did so with open eyes, but once a show proved successful due in part to theimplementation of these suggestions, feelings of self-betrayal and selling out poisoned the pleasure of his many tripsto the bank. This would result in Williams ultimately making a great show of giving self-serving statements to thepress about how he had to compromise his principles in order to satisfy provincial sensibilities. (John Lahr’sexceptional biography Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh recounts this pattern of behavior indelicious detail.)

Certainly the film version of Cat on a HotTin Roof thoroughly subverts the entiretheme of Williams’ play, but given hisrun-ins with the censors and HollywoodProduction Code during the making of AStreetcar Named Desire six yearsearlier, one wonders what he possiblycould have expected. Exactly what hegot, it seems, for the half-million dollarshe accepted from MGM for the rights toCat on a Hot Tin Roof proved to behis guilt-ridden deal with the devil.Above is how Cat on a Hot Tin Roof 'slast scene might have played out had thefilm kept Williams' original ending. But after 108 minutes of sexual advance-retreat, Hollywood knew 1958audiences would tear down the theater if these two beautiful specimens weren't granted their hard-won happyending.

BONUS MATERIALThe 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 2½ hours, is the most complete filmed staging.

Copyright © Ken Anderson10/12

"I do love you Brick. I do!"

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

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