Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

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All the raw emotions, simmering sexuality and crackling dialogue of Tennessee Williams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play rumble like a thunderstorm in this celebrated 1958 film version, nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Elizabeth Taylor delivers one of her most iconic performances (and snagged her second Oscar nomination) as the title feline, the scheming Maggie, sexually-frustrated wife of Paul Newman’s booze-sodden Brick Pollitt (a role which earned the up-and-coming actor his first Oscar nomination). A one-time football star and scion of a moneyed Southern family, Brick now nurses a broken leg and a secret shame, while the rest of his outrageously dysfunctional family plot to inherit the estate of dying family patriarch, Big Daddy (Burl Ives). Southern-fried fireworks explode as the battling family gathers together for Big Daddy’s final birthday celebration, and Maggie spits catty barbs about her avaricious in-laws and their “no-neck monster” children, all while she torments the sexually-confused Brick with her unfettered and thwarted sensuality. Reportedly Williams’ own personal favorite among his many plays, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is Overheated Southern Melodrama incarnate, deliciously detailing the destruction of a wealthy family trapped in its own sticky web of deception, greed and denial, a place where “liquor and death do remain the only exits” – in other words, it’s 180-proof Tennessee Williams! (Dir. by Richard Brooks, 1958, USA, 108 mins., Not Rated)