A Film Canon

Cat On A Hot Tin Roof plays like a weaker version of Baby Doll, largely because Brooks lacks Kazan's peculiar affinity for Williams' plastic realism, with the result that the action, which takes place in three rooms, over a single evening, feels unbearably stagebound, while hysteria is never raised to the hallucinatory, claustrophobic, and perhaps ideally black-and-white pitch that it finds in Kazan's adaptations. This foregrounds everything potentially banal, predictable and pretentious about Williams' trademark elaboration of a trauma to be confronted and closed - a one-dimensionality that is even more grating for omitting the homosexual overtones of the stage version - while ensuring that, with the exception of Elizabeth Taylor, each member of the cast feels like a mere repetition of a few stock mannerisms. From this perspective, the most interesting dimension is the continuity drawn between Brick (Paul Newman) and Maggie's (Taylor) sexual dysfunction - most notably their inability, or unwillingness to procreate - and the children that suffuse the household in which the narrative unfolds. Not only do these form the pretext for the most memorable moments of southern grotesque, but they condense and reiterate the infantilism of that household, transforming it into the object of a pervasive, paedophobic - and, in the original, presumably homosexual - gaze that reduces them, with horror, to so much garbage, or excrement; "little no-necked" lumps of flesh, indiscernible from the ice-cream scoops that their most volatile representative insists on hurling at Maggie - an abject presence that Kazan would have presumably more elegantly collapsed into 'Big Daddy's (Burl Ives) haunting experience of 'the most thorough examination of a colon ever given'.