Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) Queer Film B+

DIRECTOR: Richard Brooks

Written (withJames Poe) and directed byRichard Brooks, this respectable adaptation of the Tennessee Williams playCat on a Hot Tin Roof opens with Brick Pollitt (Paul Newman, in his superstar breakthrough) holed up in his bedroom, drinking himself numb and mourning the memory of his best friend—read: lover—Skipper, who has recently committed suicide. Brick’s grief is eroticized, idealized, and utterly inaccessible to his wife Maggie, “the Cat,” played with aching sensuality by Elizabeth Taylor. She isn’t getting any, and she knows exactly why, which makes her feel like the cat of the title—restless, hungry, and clawing for survival.

Downstairs, the Pollitt clan gathers for Brick’s father, Big Daddy’s, birthday. Burl Ives, in his most memorable screen performance, plays the patriarch whose hidden terminal illness fuels the family’s scramble for his fortune. Maggie boldly claims she is pregnant—an untruth meant to secure her and Brick’s place in the family—leaving the film on an ambiguous but faintly hopeful note.

Judith Anderson is formidable as Big Mama; Jack Carson plays Brick’s brother Gooper; and Madeleine Sherwood is his awful wife Mae, mother of their five brats. The film softens the play’s queer core, but it can’t erase it. Brick’s paralysis, Maggie’s desperation, and Big Daddy’s frustrated attempts to force the truth into daylight all vibrate with the tension of what Williams wrote and what 1950s Hollywood could not say.

Cinematography: William Daniels

MGM

STREAMING: Amazon Prime Video, YouTube and Apple TV

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