Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: More Than a Friendship

Title: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)
Dir.: Richard Brooks
Stars: Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor, Burl Ives

Viewed: on DVD (feature only)

This review contains MAJOR SPOILERS

I have a certain fondness for films based on plays, no doubt because they tend to come ready-made with wonderful dialogue and strong characters. So it didn't take a lot of pushing for my mother to get me to watch Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, despite the fact I've never read or seen the play. (It should be noted - after viewing the film I did go read an extensive synopsis.) And I wasn't disappointed - it's a good film. Not a great film, perhaps, but definitely a good one. The cast is very strong, and I can't disagree with my mother's own assessment that there are no two more beautiful leads - Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor - to watch on a screen. These two are hot (thank you, Paris Hilton). Hot in a way that Hollywood can't really match today.

Once you get past the blazing physicality of both leads, there's the supporting players, who all play their roles with great strength. Jack Carson - whom I recall from much earlier films like Mr & Mrs Smith and April Showers - has a pretty thankless role as Gooper, Brick's (Newman) older brother, but he does the best he can with it. In fact, he arguably comes off more sympathetically than he should, considering the denoument of the story, but it balances Madeleine Sherwood's far more OTT portrayal of his wife (a character that is easy to hate). Judith Anderson may be slightly miscast as Big Momma - surely the idea is that she's just as fat and lazy as her husband? - but there isn't any way to prevent her being overshadowed by Burl Ives' Big Daddy. I've never been a Burl Ives fan, but I have to say he acquits himself very well as an actor, and no surprise; he apparently originated this role on stage.

The dialogue is, as I'd anticipated, very fast and clever, especially in the early parts of the film. You can't buy lines as good as Elizabeth Taylor's, whether they're about her persona as a cat on a hot tin roof, or about "Brother-Man and Sister-Woman's little no-neck monsters." But the good dialogue can't disguise the fact that the play has been extensively re-written for the screen, because of course the Hays Code would never allow homosexuality to be spoken of (something ultimately challenged by The Children's Hour). What first seems like clever misdirection - Brick and the late Skipper's 'friendship' is spoken of in very vague terms - eventually descends into an entirely new ending, and in fact an entirely new message. Instead of Tennessee Williams' completely dysfunctional family being utterly torn apart, things get patched together through the somewhat trite idea that they must finally learn to love each other instead of treating each other as possessions. This connects tenuously back to the Skipper subplot (because it is, in this version, a subplot, and quickly discarded), with the rather odd idea that Brick latched on to him as his one great friend whom he 'loved,' because nobody else loves him. Um...okay. It's a very Hollywood sort of conclusion and happy ending, and to their credit, Newman and Ives manage to sell it for more than it's worth (the idea of a young Big Daddy as a wandering hobo is a particularly Burl Ives-ish concept; I wonder if that was intentional).

In the context of viewing the film - it's fine. Afterwards, though, I found myself realizing what minimal cohesion the whole thing had, and how unrealistic it makes the entire experience. I think the film is best seen in that same way as many films of great books, particularly in classic Hollywood: it's never going to be as good as the play, but it's a good film in its own right and has a certain inherent charm. What would be nice is if the DVD included some history of the play, with a comparison to the film; the current version is a simple standard/widescreen flipper disc. Perhaps that's something for a future special edition.