by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Cat on a
Hot Tin Roof, made by MGM in 1958 and
based on a play by Tennessee Williams that won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in
1955. Williams’ popularity has long perplexed me; to my mind he wrote one play, The Glass Menagerie, that actually showed some sensitivity and
understanding of how normal human beings are and what makes them behave the way
they do, but then — beginning with the horrendously overrated A Streetcar
Named Desire — his world became so far
removed from reality, so dreamlike, with his characters speaking reams of the
most putrid pseudo-poetic dialogue Williams could think up for them and
enacting situations that had only the most tenuous relationship to actual human
psychology and behavior, that Dwight Macdonald once called his article slamming
Williams, William Inge and Elia Kazan “Kazanistan, Ingeland and Williams,
Tennessee.” His joke was that Williams’ and Inge’s plays and Kazan’s
productions (both of Williams and Inge works and scripts by himself and others)
took place in mythical realms whose inhabitants had only the vaguest
resemblance to actually existing homo sapiens. Macdonald also didn’t like the way Williams’ plays
“divide the Saved from the Damned with almost Calvinistic rigor” — in other
words, his good guys are really, really good (though often too weak to prevail)
and his bad guys are really, really bad.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof deals with the monumentally dysfunctional Pollitt
family of Mississippi (though only a few hints give away the locale — it’s really the “Tennessee Williams South” and it doesn’t
matter all that much which Southern U.S. state it’s nominally in), headed by Harvey “Big Daddy”
Pollitt (Burl Ives) — the first name comes from the imdb.com cast list and I
don’t recall him being called anything other than “Big Daddy” throughout the
film. (Even the legend on his hideous-looking — and transparently fake —
birthday cake reads “Big Daddy” on the side.) As the film begins, Big Daddy’s
son Brick (Paul Newman), a former athletic hero in high school who’s just quit
his job as a sports announcer and spends his days getting drunk on Big Daddy’s
booze and laying around Big Daddy’s house feeling sorry for himself, goes out
and sets up some hurdles on the local high-school track where he starred Way
Back When. He tries to run the hurdles again and, of course, he trips on one
and either lames or breaks his leg — at least he limps for the rest of the film
— and he’s also horribly mean and cruel to his incomprehensively devoted wife,
Maggie (Elizabeth Taylor at the height of her fame, fortune and stunning
hourglass figure). After Brick’s unfortunate encounter with a recalcitrant
hurdle, the next thing we see is the preparation for Big Daddy’s 65th
birthday party; he’s scheduled to fly in that day from a series of medical
tests at a special clinic (he’s obviously suffering from cancer, though the
“C”-word is never used on the soundtrack) and two cars drive to the airport to
meet him: one driven by Maggie (alone) and one by Brick’s brother Gooper (Jack
Carson, who in real life was only one year younger than his on-screen “father,”
Burl Ives), Gooper’s wife May (Madeleine Sherwood) and their even more
repulsive five children, who’ve been trained to welcome Big Daddy home with a
Confederate flag and a bad rendition of “Dixie” on kazoos made to look like
real instruments. At first Dr. Baugh (Larry Gates) lies to Big Daddy and tells
him he’s fine — just suffering from a spastic colon — but the truth eventually
emerges: not only does Big Daddy have cancer, it’s spread so fast he’s unlikely
to last another year and in the meantime it’s going to put Big Daddy in so much
pain his doctor has prescribed morphine injections — which Big Daddy, in what
passes for virtue in a Tennessee Williams story, refuses because he wants to
remain clear-headed until his death.
The film’s dramatic issues are Big Daddy’s
impending death and his inner struggle over whom to leave his estate to — the
offensive and creepy Gooper, who’s become a corporate attorney and produced
five potential heirs to keep the Pollitt family name going; or Brick, whom he
likes far better but worries about because he’s an alcoholic and childless. Brick
is childless because he won’t have sex with his wife Maggie — itself a hard
plot twist to believe if only because one’s movie-conditioned expectations are
that if two such beautiful people as Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor were
married to each other they’d be humping like bunny rabbits at every conceivable
occasion — and it turns out, in a device which Williams was more able to be
explicit about on stage than the screenwriters, Richard Brooks (who also
directed) and James Poe, could be with the dregs of the Production Code still
in effect, that Brick and his high-school friend Skipper had some sort of Gay
crush on each other. Apparently Skipper tried to establish his hetero
credentials Tea and Sympathy-style by having sex with Maggie in a hotel room after a football game
in which his team, bereft of Brick’s services after he was injured in a
previous game, got creamed 47 to 0 — only nothing happened except Skipper threw
himself out of the hotel room and thereby fell 11 stories to a self-inflicted
death. (Once again suicide is the wages of Gayness in a 1950’s movie — one more
piece of evidence of how deeply Tennessee Williams hated himself and especially
hated his own Gay sexual orientation.) Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a modern-seeming movie in that there’s no one
in it we actually like — at one
point I joked, apropos of the
two virtually silent Black characters who are the Pollitts’ servants and do
their jobs quietly and efficiently with no involvement in the Williams
melodrama the white people are enacting around them, “You can tell this is a new Southern story — the Blacks are the only rational
ones.” Cat is also one of those
movies in which two plot lines are interwoven but one of them — Big Daddy’s
genuinely moving contemplation of his own impending death — is far more
interesting than the other, Brick’s inexplicable (at least in this Production
Code-bowdlerized version) disinterest in having sex with his wife even though
she’s being played by Elizabeth Taylor at the height of her violet-eyed,
hourglass-figured glory before she started putting on the pounds (20 years
after this movie, in a TV-movie called Repeat Performance, she looked like the Goodyear blimp stood on end).
At the end — in a happy ending Williams detested so much he told people waiting
on line to see the film that they shouldn’t bother — Maggie lies to Big Daddy
that Brick has indeed impregnated her, and for whatever reason (authorial fiat
or the realization that now that his wife has said she’s going to have a baby
he’d better do what he can to bring that about) Brick and Maggie close the door
to their room in Big Daddy’s house and prepare to do the deed. The title is
referenced only a couple of times — Maggie compares herself to a cat on a hot
tin roof apropos of nothing else in the
script (except that Williams’ audience expected the titles of his plays to be
as pseudo-poetic as their dialogue) and says the victory of a cat on a hot tin
roof is “just stayin’ on, I guess.” Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a movie you’d probably like if you were more attuned
to Williams’ mythos than I
am — and though he was already dead before the film went into production, James
Dean was apparently considered for the leading role and it’s fascinating to
imagine what it might have been like if he’d lived and been in it (especially
since two of Dean’s three films, East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause, are also centered around clashes between an
alienated young man and his father), and Charles said that while the first time
he saw Cat he had been most
fascinated by the Gay intimations, this time he saw it largely as a prototype
of a 1960’s movie, with Brick a proto-hippie who couldn’t be less interested in
Big Daddy’s estate and can’t wait to get out of there and hit the road again
(the backstory is that Big Daddy’s own father was a hobo who left him nothing
and he doesn’t want to make the same “mistake” with his son, who obviously identifies far more with his granddad than his
dad). It’s also intimated that the reason Big Daddy loved the irresponsible
Brick more than the grounded but annoying Gooper (where did Tennessee Williams
get these names?) was that Gooper isn’t his biological son — his wife,
inevitably called “Big Momma” (Judith Anderson, who after having played Mrs.
Danvers, Medea and Lady Macbeth knew all about dysfunctional families on screen!), was four
months pregnant when they married.
Ultimately Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a well-staged adaptation of a pretty pointless
story that misses as many dramatic issues as it hits — Newman and Taylor were
both nominated for Academy Awards but as far as I’m concerned Burl Ives
(repeating a role he’d played on stage) out-acted both of them — and I can see
the appeal of Tennessee Williams as a writer (his peak, the 1950’s, was also
the height of the influence of Method acting, which instructed performers to
delve deeply into the backstories of their characters; one reason Williams did
so well in that period was he wrote scripts about characters who lived so much
in their pasts they were uniquely suited for Method actors) but I really can’t
share it. The previous four Williams movies had all been filmed in
black-and-white, and the original plan was to do this one in monochrome too —
but director Brooks decided he wasn’t going to give up the chance to put Paul
Newman’s blue eyes and Liz Taylor’s violet ones on screen in color. This might
not have been a bad decision if Brooks had had Douglas Sirk’s skill at using color for dramatic effect — but he didn’t; though
at least there are other colors in the mix besides the green and brown that
have become the default settings for modern movies, the color is pretty
automatic and there’s no attempt to use color to heighten the dramatic values of the story — such as they are.
It’s obviously a “quality” movie based on material that was considered
“important” in the 1950’s, but its reticence about Big Issues like
homosexuality, impotence and suicide makes it seem rather dated today. And Paul Newman probably had a bad case of dèja vu while making this movie because the year before he'd made one almost exactly like it, The Long Hot Summer, with his wife-to-be Joanne Woodward in Liz Taylor’s role (in fact Newman and Woodward met while making that film), Orson Welles in Burl Ives’ and William Faulkner instead of Tennessee Williams as the Southern-born story source giving the project intellectual “cred.”
