1958: Cat On A Hot Tin Roof

Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (Richard Brooks, 1958) 7/10

"Big Daddy...What is it that makes him so big? His big heart? His big belly? Or his big money? (Brick Pollitt)

The theatre of Tennessee Williams is one of liars and failures, conniving creatures and tortured customers. Perhaps no other work in his oeuvre better represented and quantified these diverse characteristics than Williams' 1955 Pulitzer Prize winning play Cat On A Hot Tin Roof: a tawdry story built around the falsehoods of its characters and the complex socio-cultural environment they operate within.

Set in southern Mississippi, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof focuses on the destructive crises affecting the affluent Pollitt family and their divulgence over a tumultuous weekend. The film specifically centers on the fractious relationship between former athlete Brick Pollitt (Paul Newman) and his alluring wife Maggie (Elizabeth Taylor). Escaping a lifetime of poverty through marriage to the youngest member of the Pollitt clan, Maggie is perturbed by their failing marriage. Sexless and fraught with altercations, the couple's relationship reaches a nadir when they travel to Brick's family plantation to celebrate the birthday of his father known as Big Daddy (Burl Ives).

Rather than a celebratory event, Big Daddy's birthday quickly unravels into a specter of violence, drunkenness and collusion. Partially stemming from the rumour that Big Daddy is possibly dying of colon cancer, the party sours from a festival of life into a gala of connivance. Leading this scheming are Brick's solicitor brother Gooper (Jack Carson) and his acquisitive wife Mae (Madeleine Sherwood). Spawning five hellish brats, Gooper and Mae are eager to secure Big Daddy's illustrious fortune through any means possible; even through coercing Gooper's emotionally unstable mother Big Mama (Judith Anderson) into signing a series of contracts to ensure their ownership of Big Daddy's properties.

Holed up in his room with a broken ankle, the alcoholic Brick stews about the culture of lies, the family have structured itself upon. Guilt-ridden by the death of his "best friend" Skipper and distrustful toward materialism, Brick spirals into an inebriated stupor that threatens to tear apart not only his childless marriage to Maggie, but also his status in the Pollitt household.

Throughout Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, the theme of mendacity emerges as a key idea. Structuring their lives on false images and dreams, the Pollitt family sees the undoing of their individual acts of subterfuge during Big Daddy's birthday celebrations. During a stormy weekend, family members such as Brick and Big Daddy begin to see the unravelling of these lies through an earnest attempt to reconcile truth into their relationships. Big Daddy's curmudgeonly approach to others reveals a volatile desire to truly express his repressed contempt toward his wife, his ill-behaved grandchildren and Brick's wallowing into an alcohol-induced world of self-pity.

In contrast to his family's boisterous patriarch, Brick prefers to drown his resentment in liquor. His inability to express his pain and sorrow pushes him further away from his estranged wife and isolated family. Brick's anger is both recent and long-term. He virulently detests his father's idealization of love through the form of material transactions, but Brick also despises both his wife and himself for their role in Skipper's suicide. While Brick rancorously objects to his family's culture of lies, he neglects his own aggressive and frequent participation in this realm.

Brick and Skipper's past friendship is presented throughout Cat On A Hot Tin Roof in ambiguous terms, yet their is an underlying sense their relationship probably held homosexual qualities. As the recipient of a homosexual advance or perhaps a repressed homosexual himself, Brick vigorously attempts to deny the true extent of his emotionally intense bond to Skipper. In doing so, he creates voluminous fissures in his marriage to Maggie and isolates his feelings from others with disastrous consequences.

The distancing effects brought on by the repression of these feelings is smartly addressed by director Richard Brooks throughout much of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. Frequently, Brooks places characters in stark opposition to one another, often shooting characters talking to one another faced in opposite directions. This particularly works well in several of the film's key speeches involving the emotionally cold Brick. Notably, much of the play's homosexual content was muted by the censors at the time. In spite of the enforced revisions, Brooks manages to admirably maintain the sense of equivocal uncertainty fermenting in Brick's soul.

Originally earmarked for the openly gay director George Cukor, the film was instead given to Richard Brooks after Cukor turned the film down. While Cukor would have more likely given the film a greater visual eloquence, the more action-orientated Brooks offered the film a biting, steamy flavour that ultimately won over critics and audiences. The film's success aided not only the careers of Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman, but also Richard Brooks who would later go onto adapt another Tennessee Williams' play (Sweet Bird of Youth) also starring Newman and Madeleine Sherwood.

Brooding and snarling, Newman carved a niche for himself as a serious actor capable of skillfully playing the arrogant/angry young man: an archetype he would frequently revisit throughout the early stages of his career in films such as The Hustler, Hud, Sweet Bird of Youth and The Young Philadelphians. Despite losing her then third husband Mike Todd in a fiery plane crash during filming, Elizabeth Taylor continued working and produced one of the most sultry and dynamic performances of her career. Yet, the film's true show stopper was neither Newman or Taylor, but Burl Ives who reprised his Broadway role as the cranky larger-than-life patriarch Big Daddy. Played with cantankerous verve, Ives' performance provides the film's strong moral core, as well as the centre of much of its anger and sorrow.

Director Richard Brooks' Cat On A Hot Tin Roof remains one of the most enduring cinematic adaptations of Williams' work. Constructed with a moody mis-en-scene, Brooks gave Cat On A Hot Tin Roof the type of scorching, sultry atmosphere that has defined Williams work for audiences and critics alike. Unlike his second Williams' adaptation Sweet Bird of Youth, Brooks' first attempt at translating the Southern playwright was not as fatally destabilized by the censorship of the era. Rather, the film's tedious pacing is its only truly detrimental attribute; a factor that is nevertheless ultimately redeemed by its acute performances and evocative visual ornamentation.

* Cat On A Hot Tin Roof is released on DVD by Warner Home Video and is available in their excellent Tennessee Williams Film Collection box set

Other Richard Brooks films reviewed:
Sweet Bird of Youth (1962) 6/10

Copyright 2008 8½ Cinematheque

1962: Sweet Bird of Youth

Sweet Bird of Youth (Richard Brooks, 1962) 6/10

"Provocative Adult Entertainment." In 1962, Richard Brooks' second cinematic Tennessee Williams adaptation Sweet Bird of Youth truly embodied the three words emblazoned in the middle of its orange hued poster. Today, the topics discussed in Sweet Bird of Youth would appear tame to a modern audience, despite their immoral nature.

Yet in 1962, Williams' play was so risqué that when Brooks transferred Sweet Bird of Youth onto celluloid, he was unable to incorporate several topics found in Williams' play such as venereal disease and castration into the shooting script. The removal of these aspects may have changed the overall effect of the film in its conclusion; yet even without their inclusion into the film's final cut, Brooks' film still featured several taboo elements: some so controversial their existence was merely hinted at indirectly during the film.

Reprising his role on Broadway, the film stars Paul Newman as Chance Wayne: a young Floridian man desperate for success, but undeniably naive in his actions. Madly in love with Heavenly (Shirley Knight), the daughter of tyrannical Southern politician. Boss Finley (Ed Begley), Chance is informed by her father that he must acquire riches and fame in order to secure her hand in marriage. Leaving his job as a busboy at a Gulf Coast country club, Chance heads for the bright lights of New York and Hollywood to find his fortune in order to retrieve Heavenly from her father's potent grip.

Unbeknownst to Chance, his glorious vision is a fatefully flawed apparition. After years struggling to break into Hollywood as an actor, Chance has achieved little in the way of wealth or fame. The only notoriety he has accrued is through being an objectified instrument of pleasure for the wives of millionaires, the debutantes of "the horsey set" and lonely eccentrics. One such eccentric is fallen star Alexandra del Lago (Geraldine Page). Once one of Hollywood's greatest names, del Lago's latest notable escapades have less to do with her on-screen performances, but through her off-screen exodus from the preview of her latest film. Copiously addicted to drugs, alcohol and sex, Alexandra has become an agoraphobic wastrel desperate to nullify her public rejection, yet still living up to her reputation as a diva.

Believing he has found the key to his future success, Chance takes the emotionally unstable Alexandra with him to St. Cloud during a sunny Easter weekend. The religious nature of the weekend should offer all its participants a chance from redemption, cleanliness and resurrection. Nevertheless, the presence of sin and evil is well-noted. Despite confessing a sensitivity to Alexandra's plight, Chance desires to use her to fulfill his self-inflated ambitions whether it be through tender words or blackmail. Blinded by his need to impress Heavenly's father, Chance has failed to recognize the nature of his surroundings, whilst chasing his "phony dream." Nevertheless, reality and his past actions soon return to haunt him, as the follies of his ambitions and his failures become achingly clear.

At its core Sweet Bird of Youth is a film about failed dreams. Several of the film's principal characters engage in the creation of overly ambitious dreams, whose success is struck a fatal blow due to the constraints of reality. Whilst, initially inspired by Heavenly's plight, Chance's dreams morph into inflated, self-centered projects that have little chance to succeed. Lacking any genuine acting talent, Chance's only skills and attributes are purely corporeal and sexual. His in-roads into Hollywood have been through the exploitation of his youth not to sell films, but for jaded aging women to purchase youth through relationships with him. Yet, youth is a fleeting commodity and Chance in his imaginative gullibility notably fails to realize its true nature. His plans are bold and engaging, but are reliant on unlikely breaks that divert him from the original purpose of his project.

Youth is also a commodity traded by Boss Finley. Utilizing his hot-headed son (Rip Torn), Finley has amassed a small army of neo-fascistic thugs to terrorize his enemies. Despite, his Christian populist rhetoric, Finley has also used Heavenly's sexuality to secure powerful contracts, only to- as with Chance- exile these men from his state once they no longer have any socio-political value to him. In Sweet Bird of Youth Boss Finley's aggressive machismo and misogyny contrasts neatly with Chance's flaccid approach to Heavenly, whom he promises to abscond, but repeatedly fails to confront.

The theme of failure also abounds in Sweet Bird of Youth. Like the Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon in Williams' The Night of the Iguana, Chance struggles to understand his errors and seek an alternative path: instead he recreantly looks to exploit weaknesses in others (i.e. Alexandra del Lago) to writhe out of a problematic situation of his own doing. The downfall of her career has also left Alexandra del Lago in a situation, were unwilling to commit to rebuilding her reputation, the actresses sinks into a world of debauchery and sin. Yet, rather than attempting to amend these flaws directly, several characters in Sweet Bird of Youth use duplicitous means to either forget via sex and drugs or correct through violence, blackmail and fear-mongering.

Released by MGM in 1962, Sweet Bird of Youthwas a popular and critical success, which aided in cementing Paul Newman as a genuine Hollywood star. In the forty-six years since its initial release, Sweet Bird of Youth has dated in parts of its overcooked southern melodrama. Brooks' method of cutting to flashbacks is particularly poor: appearing more at home in a 1940's comedy with its swirling dissolves and similar devices. Slowly paced in parts Sweet Bird of Youth is slightly too baggy, often engaging in sub-plots that divert from the true essence of the film. Additionally, the removal of certain plot elements involving Chance and Heavenly's relationship from the play due to censorship, leaves the film's finale in a discomforting position that fails to recognize the emotional complexity of their past.

Nevertheless, Sweet Bird of Youth does feature some excellent performances in this morally acidic film. Newman is commendable as aspiring actor-cum-gigolo Chance Wayne. Geraldine Page's swings back and forth on a tumultuous emotionally pendulum as Alexandra del Lago and produces one of the film's highlights. Ed Begley's work as the nefarious Boss Finley won him an Academy Award, whilst Madeline Sherwood offers an electric performance as Finley's favourite prostitute, who becomes victim of an act of misogynistic violence that rivals Lee Marvin's coffee pot in The Big Heat and James Cagney's grapefruit in The Public Enemy

Controversial and corrosive, Sweet Bird of Youth is an enjoyable, but often turgid entry in the cycle of Tennessee Williams films Hollywood produced during the Fifties and Sixties. Despite a strong cast and edgy subject matter, Sweet Bird of Youth probably failed to fulfill its full potential on film. Certainly censorship was a critical factor, but also Brooks' direction, whilst at times laudable lacked the ability to translate Williams' intense emotionalism into the type of fruitful vehicle of pity, depravity and quasi-religious redemption Sweet Bird of Youth could and should have been.

* Sweet Bird of Youth is released on DVD by Warner Home Video and is available in their excellent Tennessee Williams Film Collection box set

Other Richard Brooks films reviewed:
Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (1958) 7/10

Copyright 2008 8½ Cinematheque