Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Richard Brooks (1958)
Tennessee Williams loathed it but, all in all, this is one of the more successful adaptations of his plays for the screen. Richard Brooks, who did the screenplay with James Poe, uses some external locations in the early scenes. By the time the camera moves inside the Pollitt family home and (more or less) stays there, sufficient interest in and tensions between the main characters have built up to turn the lack of movement outside the house into a claustrophobic dramatic virtue. (One of the play’s best-known lines is Maggie the Cat’s saying to her husband Brick, ‘I’m not living with you – we simply occupy the same cage’.) Brooks sometimes spoils this effect by stagy direction of the actors, arranging them in the frame artificially. It suggests blocking for the theatre and makes no visual sense on screen. There’s a larger problem too – and with the Williams material. This is one of those plays where people keep accusing each other of living a lie (‘mendacity’ is the preferred word here) and in which a lot of talk is needed before the ‘truth’ is revealed. There are two main lies-cum-evasions that have to be exposed: the fiction that Big Daddy Pollitt, whose sixty-fifth birthday has brought the family together, isn’t dying of cancer; and what’s at the root of his younger son Brick’s refusal to have a physical relationship with his beautiful wife. There’s nothing subtle (and not much that’s believable) about the concealing and revealing of Big Daddy’s cancer. The news is delivered to one major character at a time to maximise the opportunities for impressively acted reactions to it. The exposure of what really happened between Brick and his high school friend Skipper, and/or between Maggie and Skipper, and what caused Skipper to commit suicide and sent Brick into despairing alcoholism and frigid hostility towards Maggie, is very protracted. Besides, structured revelations of this kind are such familiar dramaturgy that it’s hard for your awareness of them as a convention of theatre writing not to come between you and experiencing the truth game as a real, dramatic situation.
Williams is comfortable here with themes and tropes that also are familiar from his other work: an emotionally ravenous heroine; a homosexual aspect; desire as something both ruinous and death-defying. The gay aspect is oddly elusive and insistent by turns. You can only assume the Brick-Skipper relationship was homoerotic: the screenplay’s references are necessarily muffled, according to the Hays Code. Yet the writing of some of Brick’s putdowns of Maggie is startling: it’s possible that Williams was drawing on misogynist elements in himself and assumed that, because he was gay and the character is similarly inclined, Brick would express himself in this way – but the language sometimes seems too harshly explicit in conveying Brick’s physical revulsion. The last scene of Cat features perhaps the finest coup de théâtre in all of Williams’s work. Maggie announces to the family that she is bringing new life into the world, that she is carrying Brick’s child. They all know that Brick won’t touch her and that the pregnancy is impossible – even if Big Daddy and Big Mama long for it to be true (as much as Brick’s mercenary elder brother Gooper and his prodigiously fertile wife Mae, clumsily campaigning to inherit Big Daddy’s vast fortune, are horrified by the idea). But Brick at least realises that the statement about new life has a truth: Maggie is telling a lie which will be sustaining to Big Daddy and Big Mama for as long as they kid themselves it’s not a lie. Maggie’s desperately loving last-throw-of-the-dice moves Brick. It’s a great moment – one that offers a tonic perspective on the play’s preoccupation with ‘truth’, which elsewhere seems phony. But it’s only a moment: Williams, who admits he was won over by Maggie in the process of writing her, goes too far (and soft in the head) in suggesting, and expecting us to believe, that her passionate loyalty and this long night of heart-to-hearts with her and his father have ‘cured’ Brick – who summons his wife to the bedroom.
There’s no denying that Elizabeth Taylor’s impact as Maggie is increased by the almost comic improbability of her being unattractive to her husband – but her beauty gives a real edge to the material too. It prevents Maggie from being merely gallant, and makes Brick’s behaviour seem more powerfully aberrant and baffling. Taylor doesn’t work her looks – she lets them work for her and concentrates on the character. She’s vivid and witty in her exchanges with Mae and her posse of ‘no neck monsters’ (the casting director did a great job in finding remarkably vile children, who are very convincing as a brood). When Brick wounds her with what he says, Taylor registers the hurt delicately, affectingly. She gets across marvellously Maggie’s quick temper and her nearly as quick ability to suppress it – you see the anger rise and bloom and almost immediately go back inside her. It’s one of Taylor’s finest performances.
Paul Newman is very good as Brick. He’s easily believable as the golden-boy high- school athlete gone wrong. Newman’s eyes and mouth are famously sensitive but his completely masculine presence makes Brick more interesting than if the actor seemed homosexual in any obvious way. There are moments when the dialogue seems too copious to suit Newman – he doesn’t need to verbalise his feelings in order to let you see into Brick’s anguished mind. But words getting in the way is much less of a problem here than in the later Sweet Bird of Youth. Newman’s ability to fix a look that transforms the emotional momentum of a scene is used to electrifying effect in Brick’s reaction to Maggie’s announcement that she’s pregnant. Burl Ives, who had played Big Daddy on stage, is also impressive. The combination of his physical bulk and his light voice credibly suggests a man who rarely needs to turn up the volume to exert his authority. It also works well as an expression of Big Daddy’s fearful mortality – so that his voice conveys frailty and his big, powerful body looks to be on the verge of becoming dead weight. Although Judith Anderson didn’t play Big Mama in the theatre, her acting – the emotional crescendos, the physical positions she holds, the length of the pauses – seems predetermined and obvious. Jack Carson is adequate as Gooper but there’s a lack of imagination in the performance as well as the character. As Mae, Madeleine Sherwood gives a very effective portrait of a woman of limited brain and unlimited venal ambition.
At the end of the showing in NFT1, there was a fair amount of applause – an accolade usually reserved for films of formidable solemnity. I think this was largely an expression of the audience’s feelings about the two stars – relief that they’d got through the traumas of the story and that two people with the looks of Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman were, after all, happy to go to bed with each other. I realised this was what I was feeling anyway, although I wasn’t joining in the applause. It’s amusing that we in the cinema are as keen to swallow the unpersuasive happy ending as Big Daddy and Big Mama are to believe in Maggie’s pregnancy – even if this is all about the power of star acting and the skill of Tennessee Williams’s stagecraft and nothing to do with dramatic truthfulness. The rather magical effect of this self-delusion is that you come out of the picture feeling happy.
26 November 2008