The problem with the movie version of Tennessee Williams' Cat On a Hot Tin Roof is not the censorship so much (which removed the homosexual aspect of the story, though it's still there for the more perceptive viewers) but the play itself. Director Richard Brooks does a decent job with it, but the play's the thing, and the play ain't that good. I have no problem with the movie. Elizabeth Taylor is well cast as Maggie the Cat, Paul Newman is apprpriately brooding and convincingly impotent as her husband Brick, Burl Ives bellows authoritatively as Big Daddy, and Jack Carson is almost painfully good as Newman's sycophantic brother Gooper, who in some ways is more impotent than his sibling. The story can basically be summed up as 'Daddy's dyin' and who's got the will', or rather the money. It is set in the contemporary South. Much of what goes on hinges on the refusal on the part of son Brick to have sex with his wife. Since the old man is dying he wants to help favorite son (and ne'er do well) Brick, but is more or less forced by circumstances to prefer Gooper, who has children who will keep the family going. Big Daddy holds Gooper in contempt. He is concerned over Brick's drinking, sexual problems, and his personality in general. The conflict between father and son is as much the focal point of the play as the son's sex stuff. I find this play somewhat repulsive; it's as sycophantic as Gooper. Williams aims his pen, so to speak, at the heart of Middle America. He is out to enlighten his audience on sexual matters; also on life in the then still exotic Deep South. I have no problems with either of these goals except that as issues they don't belong in a serious play; they belong in the back pages of magazines like The New Republic and The Nation. I believe it is beneath Williams' enormous talent for him to curry favor with his audience the way he does here, with his ostentatious 'Southernisms', as in terms of endearment such as 'sister woman', and in Maggie's calling herself 'Maggie the Cat', and all the talk about the kids as 'no neck monsters'. This is sitcom stuff. Williams' language, so beautiful in The Glass Menageries and A Streetcar Named Desire, fails him here. The sexy aspect of the play, big news in the fifties, is not news at all any more. Thus the sensationalism, so crucial a factor in the play's success, is missing. I felt continually manipulated into reacting to the material in a certain way. Unlike in his earlier works, Williams doesn't give his audience much breathing space; there's little room here to form a personal interpetation. Williams sets things up so that either Cat is a 'laugh riot',--and of course devilishly sophisticated as well--or it is nothing, a mere anecdote, a failed epiphany maybe. It is a mediocre play, all the more disappointing because its author is anything but, and so the occasional flashes of brilliance become more irritating than revelatory, only serving to remind us that Williams could do so much better. Yet it is if nothing else well-crafted. Williams' professionalism does not fail him here. Cat belongs to its time, before girls wore bikinis on the beach, when homosexuality, hell, sexuality in general, was spoken about in whispers by polite people, and even then not too often. The play owes a huge debt to Freud and Freudian analysis, which Williams was in at the time, and it shows.
Review of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
