CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF (1958) *** Tennesee Williams always tackled amibitous issues, always over-stated his point, and always had to be forgiven because there were always some dazzling runs of dialogue that transceneded the entire thing, even, at his greatest moments, the ambitious issues. Stuff so great that anyone could sound like a genius reading it, but only the truely great can milk every little drop of cosmological endoplasm from the words, and make them mystically rematerizlize in the hearts of the audience. Who, if Tennessee gets his way in this one, will then go home and make passionate love to their partner. The other thing that always happens with Tennessee, in movies, is that they try to paint away his more perverse bits. And, these years later when nothing (much else) is shocking, ain't that what keeps him relevant? In any event the actors deliver the high moments and better than muddle through what the censors and screenplay writers wrought. Burl Ives is the most impressive, the most steady and consistent, as Big Daddy the personification of the dying south with all of its chivalry and machismo and earthiness. Obviously this was not political typecasting, in fact Burl was lucky to have a career afloat in the wake of McCarthyism, but he'd long since perfected the role on the stage. Elizabeth Taylor smolders as Maggie the Cat, she's far too appealing for us to ever believe any of the petty southern socialite colourings, but in the stillness of the moments between....in her white dress...she smolders everything into the part that anyone could have ever dreamed. Few women in the history of mankind could have sustained that hair-do, and been so sensual that no one even notices. Paul Newman gets the best line of them all (when he explains to Burl why he doesn't commit suicide), and they probably didn't do his career any immediate harm by airbrushing out the gayer bits. Unfortunately, for posterity, we'll never know how much Newman could have given if he'd been allowed to manifest his sensitivity in that decidedly unconventional (at least for the time) direction. Richard Brooks knows that he has a royal flush of talent and material that money couldn't begin to imagine how to produce, and he plays it right: he gives the actors the script and theatrical sets, he sits back and he lets 'em go, he allows the camera a reverence at the expense of notoriety, and then he probably went home and pumped his wife, like mostly everybody else.
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