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Back to the Feature: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)

Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a very gay play. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the 1958 movie adaptation by Richard Brooks tries the best it can not to be that. And yet… the gay text has a way of seeping through. In some of the context and material, there’s no way that it couldn’t.
Not that it assuaged Williams very much, a gay man himself, who hated this adaptation of arguably his second most famous play in spite of its other aspects that remain loyal -such as its staging and a few of its cast members. But it was indisputably toned down in spite of what material it kept, and you wonder if it wouldn’t have been had it been made even just a few years later -this being very much one of the last movies notably touched by the Hays Code, in some respects. Certainly one might guess the censors were a touch prickled by one of the movie's signature selling points: the sex appeal of Elizabeth Taylor, emphasized in the film poster and promotional stills. It made for an enduring image of Taylor as she entered the peak years of her adult career, yet it distracted attention from another major sex symbol whose career was here quietly launched.
And he happens to be the story’s more prominent character, despite Taylor being so emphasized. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is the story of Brick and Maggie Pollitt, the latter -dubbed the “Cat”- played by Taylor, and the former played a promising rising actor called Paul Newman. They’ve been in a loveless marriage for a while now -it is bemoaned by Maggie that they haven’t had sex in a long time, while Brick has thrown himself into a debilitating alcoholism and depression. They are reasonably well-off, though Brick’s father -known as Big Daddy and played by Burl Ives who originated the part- is quite wealthy, causing Maggie to worry about their inheritance given Brick’s habits; alongside the fact that she is childless and quietly socially shamed for that fact while Brick’s brother and sister-in-law have a large family of kids. Brick breaks his ankle during a drunken midnight hurdle on a track field just before Big Daddy arrives at their house for a 65th birthday celebration and the good news that his cancer has apparently gone into remission. And so it is a family reunion destined to go awry, as arguments break out and old wounds are opened particularly around Brick’s relationship with his father and the reasons behind his hostile attitude towards Maggie and his addiction.
Much of it stems from a guy called Skipper. According to the text of this movie, he was a college friend of Brick’s with whom he played football, who developed a co-dependency on Brick before allegedly sleeping with Maggie and then committing suicide. A few other convoluted details around Maggie’s feelings of jealousy, Brick’s misunderstood admiration for Skipper, and his own guilt over ignoring Skipper in the period leading up to his death is eventually revealed to explain the situation of his drinking problem and dismay towards Maggie. In the play however a lot of this ancillary -the suggestion being that Brick had had a sexual relationship with Skipper, one that was complicated by both external and internalized homophobia, and that his treatment of Maggie, specifically their lack of a sexual relationship, stems merely from his not being attracted to women. Brooks however, who two years later had no problems addressing taboo themes of religious charlatanism with Elmer Gantry, didn’t consider the gay themes necessary. Yet this did open up a problem around Brick’s rejection of Maggie, given Brooks (arguably rightly) felt a mainstream audience wouldn’t accept the idea of an ostensibly heterosexual man refusing to have sex with Elizabeth Taylor -necessitating a more complex explanation. It wasn’t the first (see These Three from 1936), nor would it be the last time (see Breakfast at Tiffany’s from 1961) an adaptation’s story would be muddied by the censoring of its critical homosexual themes.
Yet they are still curiously tangible in the movie, as there really was only so much Brooks could do to conceal them entirely. Brick’s whole emotional character revolves around the death of this man -you’d be hard-pressed not to read something deeper there, especially with its link towards his sexual abstinence with his wife. And Newman does play it very strongly, with a passion that supports the notion of a man reeling over a dead lover rather than a friend. Big Daddy's attitude towards him also belies something more than just a disgust with his drinking habit -there is a subtext of toxic masculinity that pervades their interactions, particularly in Brick's emasculating injury.
Big Daddy is emasculated too of course by his wheezing and coughing and the fact initially unbeknownst to him that the cancer hasn't actually gone away, it is a ruse for his benefit, and he is likely to die within a year. Just as Brick is charged for his drinking and his sexual disinterests, Big Daddy is attacked ultimately for his failings as a father owing to his preoccupations with his legacy and that of his family. These arguments are the bulk of the drama, and Maggie is involved too, as she fights to clear her name in Brick's eyes (infidelity having not actually taken place) and secure her own ambitions within the family against her judgemental in-laws. But she takes a backseat for a decent chunk of the action despite being the titular cat over the hot tin roof of these long-gestating family squabbles.
Taylor's performance thus feels like a trial run for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? -a similar movie in which she would feature more prominently and win an Oscar for her portrait of raw spite eight years later. She is a powerful presence here, don't get me wrong, as strong and assertive in her scenes with Newman, she captures well the bile and ambition of a woman who has it in her to be as mean as her husband -while also that desperate desire to please. But it is indeed her sex appeal that stands out the most, especially for the times. Her lean slip, mild by today's standards, is more revealing than was typically allowed. And it needs to be for a story so driven by sexuality and allusions to sexual intercourse. Newman is more engaging though -the film was his first Oscar nomination and you can see why. He is brooding but fiercely emotional and delivers on Williams’s powerful dialogue in a perfectly vivid way, not unlike his acting school classmate Marlon Brando a few years earlier in another famous adaptation of a Tennessee Williams play. The vulnerability he plays is a nice mixture of theatrical and palpable, a sharp signal for the career to come. Ives is also quite good, his familiarity with the material is an asset and especially so as the cracks in Big Daddy’s demeanour start to show in his insecurities around his family’s legacy. Ives won an Oscar that year for The Big Country, but this was his better performance.
There is a degree to which the high level of drama and shock reveals about old actions and motivations can get exhausting -and Brooks keeps to the rather limited space allotted by the source’s stage origins, though he does make use of a few interesting compositions within this -honing in on Brick’s face in close-up for example while other characters talk of him in the background. And in the basement where he and Big Daddy have their ultimate clash, a great portrait of his promising football career hangs prominently behind them -likely a transfer from the show but one that is much more potent on screen for what it is saying. Similarly you have the bed always present in the bedroom scenes and in the arguments between Brick and Maggie it looms there as a spectre of Maggie’s carnal needs.
The rest of the family are interesting less in their characters as in their thematic function. Gooper (Jack Carson) and Mae (Madeleine Sherwood) are on the surface the perfect mirror image to Brick and Maggie in terms of their upper-class nuclear family image (though their children are brats), but Big Daddy doesn't care nearly as much for their perfections as he does for Brick's inadequacies. They still have to work for his attention. Mae in particular is rather cutthroat and vicious to Maggie, scheming to have her and Brick excised from the will and the family cotton fortune -something that is also laced with some revealing commentary on what exactly this family's legacy is and the warped nature of Big Daddy's preoccupation with it. Big Mama, played by an often scandalized Judith Anderson, is caught in the middle of a power play between two daughters-in-law -ultimately forced into assertiveness.
It is still the less interesting drama though, and the matter of Brick's potential homosexuality factoring into it is missed and leaves it rather tame and a bit too like a soap opera. The reckoning between Brick and Big Daddy carries more tangible heft and finds an equilibrium in the end that has different connotations here than in the play. Maggie's birthday present to Big Daddy is a symbolic catharsis for him -the announcement she is pregnant- much as Brick knows it is not true. And the movie ends with them readying to make it true for Big Daddy, which is equated with an implied new leaf for Brick and reconciliation for their marriage. The gay reading though makes it out as a depressing adherence to social sexual norms. And it is in fact hard not to see it in that light.
Williams's gift for drama is on full display in this movie even if some of the factors that really made the original Cat on a Hot Tin Roof work and resonate have been cut down. It is not by any means as strong as something like A Streetcar Named Desire, much as it endeavours to exist in a similar space. Its' cast and some of Brooks's direction carry the movie and make it an enjoyable watch, while those themes of homophobia manage to come across in subtextual ways that are quite interesting. And its colours and designs are very rich. It's little wonder the movie did big things for both Taylor and Newman's careers regardless of its reception with Williams himself (and despite his own reservations, Newman would team up with Brooks again four years later for another Williams adaptation, Sweet Bird of Youth). It earns at least some of its praise and notoriety, especially as a bellwether of Hollywood's evolution around sex. You just with it were merely a little more evolved.

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