"Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (1958)

To watch Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is to watch two of the most insanely attractive stars of early Hollywood verbally spar it out. Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman were ridiculously good looking, a fact that does not go uncommented upon in the film, but they were also commensurately talented, and they are easily the most interesting part of this uneven but often searing film, besides Burt Ives’ excellent turn as Big Daddy. Taylor and Newman’s Southern good looks are worth pointing out because the film is deeply concerned with the rottenness underneath the decadent surfaces of a Southern aristocratic family. Brick (Newman) and Maggie (Taylor) look like the perfect couple but a gaping rift has formed between them. Brick, a former football star whose best days are behind him, has taken up drinking incessantly; he quietly shuts out the world and gazes into the distance as if barely aware of the presence of other humans. Maggie, who on some level married Brick to marry into money, is partly responsible for Brick’s funk, seducing his close friend Skipper, who guilt-strickenly killed himself in response. But Brick’s problems run deeper and extend further back to his upbringing in a family so obsessed with money and status that they failed to actually build any meaningful, affectionate connections. At its center is Burt Ives as the patriarch, a lumbering man unaware that he’s soon to be dead from a cancer that might as well symbolize the barely veiled decay of the family. The film writes much of Tennessee Williams’ Southern languor into the tone and mood of the film; the cinematography and direction give the sense of a long summer day that just won’t seem to end; sweat accumulating and clinging to every fabric until it matches the heated passions of the characters it sticks to. While the film is unnecessarily sluggish and wooden (it handles transitions between scenes pretty horrendously), Taylor, Newman and Ives are still electrifying. 

Grade: B