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Tennessee Williams's play about the greed-ridden Southern Pollitt family is peppered with tension & salted with anger. The family's patriarch, Big Daddy (Burl Ives) is dying, not dead. Yet, inheritance is the topic that divides the nuclear family. The son who struggles with impossible paternal expectations, Brick (Paul Newman), & wife Maggie (Elizabeth Taylor), are contantly inflamed by his cool, drunken distance & her ever taunting wanton desire for passion. Younger son, Gooper (Jack Carson), & his perpetually pregnant wife, Mae (Madeleine Sherwood), breed for the approval of Big Daddy. Brick, the ex-former football star lives in the past Big Daddy favors him for. Tension spreads like wild fire as the Pollitts gather at Big Daddy's home because he's dying. Taylor's sultry 'cat' & Newman's angry dogging performances are iconoclastic. Williams' poignant dialogue perpetually fuels Taylor & Newman to ignite each scene with passionate heat & hate. Big Daddy's (Ives) self-centered, domineering, insensitivity is the root cause of his family's strife. Brick, fears his life; his father's in-love with his own. It's towards Maggie where Brick aims his living inheritance: insensitive self-ceneteredness. Maggie, the barren daughter-in-law temptress expresses tender adoration for Big Daddy as much as she releases contempt for Brick's frigid rejections. Judith Anderson, as Ida 'Big Momma' Pollitt, plays the typical Williams matron who exists in a house of delusions. Although she's the epitome of Big Daddy's tormented, desperately lonely, unloved partner, towards the end she gains Big Daddy's repect with her nobile devotion. Under-appreciated, Gooper Pollitt (Carson) is Brick's conformist brother, worn down from leaping through hoops to serve Big Daddy's commands & still winding up over-looked. Gooper's house of breeding brats is his wife's, Mae Flynn Pollitt's (Madeleine Sherwood), scheming, ambitious bidding for Big Daddy's favor & fortune. Clearly the main thread of plot strung throughout the film is the father-son struggle. As such, Ives & Newman are prefectly cast. Even with Burl Ives delivering as close to classic a performance as one gets, Elizabeth Taylor steals the show all the way. She has to shape-shift to interact with each different family member. As Maggie does, she's the one who is the 'cat on the hot time roof' who's having to leap from one hot spot to another without any relief from the heat. Rather than her beauty capturing audiences, it's Dame Taylor's acting acumen that does. Taylor transitions in & out of each type of Maggie, like a cat with nine lives. The audience doesn't realize how much she's shifting her personas to keep the peace in the family. She has to do so in order to survive the heat & flaming arrows aimed at her. However, Maggie is the only one who truly loves Big Daddy. After all, she's madly in love with his son who's so like him. In 1959, "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" went home from the Oscars empty handed after being nominated for 6! Taylor won the Golden Laurel for "Top Female Dramatic Performance." Dame Taylor was successively nominated for Best Actress Oscars in 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, & then again, in 1967: she won in 1961 for her most brazenly sensuous role as a call-girl in "BUtterfield 8," & again, in 1967, for Martha, the maniacal wife of Richard Burton's George, the history professor with whom she royally unleashed herself in, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"~Read full review
ome movies never get old. I watched this in Dec 2011 and couldn't get over what a fabulous film it is and was. Sultry, stimulating and rich with palatable drama. I loved it. There's no need for a remake on this one... it's already great. Blessings, Max Rainet. **If you found this information at all helpful, please take a moment to select the "yes" button below. The more people that select the "yes" button, the better the chance this REVIEW is seen by more eBay members.
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