Movie-A-Day: Cat On A Hot Tin Roof

Starring: Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor, Burl Ives, Jack Carson, Judith Anderson Director: Richard Brooks Year Of Release: 1958 Plot: Alcoholic ex-footballer Brick has broken his leg. He’s reluctantly returned to the family plantation to celebrate his father, Big Daddy’s, birthday. However Big Daddy is concerned about Brick’s strained and childless marriage to Maggie, but Brick’s got something on his pushy dad, as he knows the old man in dying of cancer. Maggie desperately wants Brick to give up the bottle and love her, but the alcoholic is haunted by the death of his best friend Skipper.

I love Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. If fact I’m a rather big fan of anything touched by Tennessee Williams. He’s an absolutely glorious writer who has that rare ability to create characters that are able to be two almost opposite things at the same time. Every character in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof is hero, villain and tragic figure. They are the creators of their own misfortune and yet seemingly at the mercy of it. They are cruel one minute, kind the next, and yet their actions are never less than 100% human.

Tennessee Williams has that rare Shakespearean quality to create characters who are always compelling, but who cause you to constantly question them. Are they good? Are they bad? Are they trustworthy? Do they deserve our sympathy or are they lost causes? Characters who in most stories would be unashamed villains, are understandable and somewhat tragic in Williams play, while the heroes do things that would make them the bad guy in most stories.

For example in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof there’s Gooper, who tries to force his parents into leaving him the family fortune at the moment he discovers his father is father is dying, while completely shutting out his brother. It sounds ounds pretty villainous, but his explanation of why he’s doing what he’s doing is understandable, and you can sympathise with why he thinks his brother is hopeless and doesn’t deserve to inherit.

I really could gush on all day as Williams is my favourite playwright, and while A Streetcar Named Desire is perhaps more exciting, in my opinion Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, first performed in 1955, is his most perfect play (he won Pulitzers for both). In fact I might even go as far to say it’s the best play of the 20th Century, but I’m sure many would disagree with me.

I also love the film version, which is similar to the stage version and yet completely different at the same time. The differences between the two versions are almost impressive, as the screenplay for the film is 95% Williams’ dialogue, but the changes result in a film that’s a completely different experience to watching the play. In fact, the playwright himself absolutely loathed the 1958 film version starring Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman. Although the tale is possibly apocryphal, Williams is said to have told people in a queue waiting to watch the movie that they should go home because “This movie will set the industry back 50 years.”

The normal assumption is that Williams disliked the movie because it removed references to the main character and his dead best friend’s possible homosexuality (and this is why George Cukor turned down the chance to direct the film). However this is less of a problem than you might expect. Although explicitly talking about homosexuality was still banned from the screen in the late 50s, it wasn’t as strictly enforced as it had been a few years before, and so it’s still present in the film, although buried under the surface and very much muted, rather than forcefully shouted as in the stage version. It’s also true that in Williams’ initial play, the nature of Brick’s relationship with his friend Skipper is never resolved.

It seems Skipper was gay, but we don’ discover whether Brick and Skipper were in love but didn’t acted on it, if Skipper’s death forced Brick to examine his own nature and he’s now realised he’s gay, or if Brick just assumes people will think his love for his friend was sexual, and while his anger is actualy more with himself, it gets directed at other people. Even Williams himself said he’d never fully worked out exactly what the nature of Brick and Skipper’s relationship was, and in the play it doesn’t really matter, as it’s only what the characters feel about it that makes any difference.

Although the removal of explicit references to homosexuality removes some of the subtext and durm and strang of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof - as well as one of the most interest aspects of the characters’ dysfunction - it’s not actually as important an alteration of a couple other things that seem small at first, but are actually pretty fundamental changes.

The first is related to the removal of homosexuality, but only incidentally. In the play, Brick says his wife Maggie almost slept with Skipper in a desperate bid to save her marriage (which makes sense in context). Brick believes his friend almost cheated with his wife because Maggie had accused Skipper of being gay, and so Skipper tried and failed to have sex with her in order to prove he was straight. His subsequent suicide stemmed from the fact that not being able to sleep with Maggie had convinced him he was indeed gay, and then Brick hung up on his when he confessed (although it’s unclear whether he confessed to the attempted infidelity, being gay or both). As a result, Brick now hates both Maggie and himself, and has disappeared into drink. It should be noted though, that while this is what Brick says, we don’t know these are the absolute facts, as Brick could be massaging the truth, or is extrapolating based on what he thinks probably happened.

However in the film, Maggie says she attempted to sleep with Skipper to try and save her marriage (although there’s no explanation of why she thought that was a good idea), but rather than it being Skipper who’d stopped things (because he was unable to perform), it was her. She says Skipper was eager to sleep with her, which is of course a very different set of events to what the characters say led to Skipper’s death in the play. 

Although it initially seems a relatively small change about things that happened in the past and are only talked about in the film, it’s absolutely vital as it completely changes the nature of Brick’s moral paralysis. In the play his decline has come about because he’s utterly trapped by guilt that never resolves itself, as he genuinely doesn’t know how to feel about himself and his friend’s death. Alcohol has become the only way to shut out the voices in his head, while he can barely bring himself to converse with his wife. The fact the truth of the relationship between Brick and Skipper is never resolved, and that the events that led to his suicide are questionable, creates an incredibly complex dynamic, where the audience, like the characters, don’t know quite how they should feel.

The film turns it into a rather more straightforward case of Brick being angry at his friend and his wife for attempting to cheat, and that he feels guilty that his friend killed himself after Brick refused to speak to him. It works but it completely changes what the play was trying to do, and you can understand why Williams didn’t like it.

The other change comes at the end and is a far more noticeable alteration from stage to screen. There are actually two different versions of the third act of Williams’ play (with the film offering another, although director Richard Brooks made the changes there rather than Williams), one of which the playwright preferred and was used in the first London production, and another that was used during the very first production in New York.

The second, Broadway version came about because director Elia Kazan wasn’t sure about the play’s conclusion. While Williams didn’t mind making Maggie a more sympathetic character, he was less keen on two other suggestions. One was that Big Daddy, who’s the major driving force of the Second Act, completely disappears from the final third of the play and Kazan wanted him back on stage before the end. The other was that Kazan felt Brick should undergo some sort of character transformation by the end of the play. While Williams made some concessions to these ideas in the Broadway version, it’s obvious he didn’t want to embrace them wholeheartedly.

The most noticeable difference is that in the original version, Brick has been vocal about his dislike and anger (as well as his sexual revulsion) at his wife all the way through the play, and that doesn’t really change at the end. In the Broadway Version, although Brick doesn’t suddenly love his wife, you get the feeling her sheer force of will has brought them to the tipping point of some sort of change (although the play is careful never to absolutely say Brick has forgiven his wife and will definitely sleep with her. It’s more of a softening of his attitude).

However in Richard Brook’s film version, after a lot of shouting and anger, in the closing seconds it’s very clear that Brick is going to get his wife pregnant and their marriage is apparently on the mend. However Brick’s almost 180-degree turnaround seems to be born out of him wanting to spite his sister-in-law and because the laws of Hollywood demand it, rather than because it genuinely following from what’s happened in the film.

It’s this change to the ending more than anything else that seems to have pissed Williams off, and it does seem a betrayal of what he was trying to do with the play. For a start, he didn’t believe that anyone would genuinely change so quickly in such as short space of time, no matter how dramatic the events (the play and film take place over the course of a single evening). The movie also turns things into a much more standard narrative. It fits the audience’s expectations for romance and reconciliation, but it’s not true to the situation Williams sets up. It means that for 100 minutes the damaged, angry characters are allowed to let rip, while the final few moments suddenly tame the whole thing and restore a bourgeois normality that seemingly comes out of nowhere.

Like I said, I do love the film, but it’s more for the uniformly brilliant performances from an absolutely first-rate cast, and that despite the fact that it trims off many of the complexities of the play, it’s very easy to enjoy (to be honest, the changes that make the story more traditional are probably what ensured it became a box office hit, and it’s still more complex than most Hollywood movies). However by taming Williams’ narrative, it changes a play that’s troubling, dysfunctional and utterly gripping – and which leaves you reeling as you try to get to grips with the complexities of what you’ve just seen – into a far simpler animal, which is easier to enjoy but less intellectually satisfying.

I can certainly understand why Williams hated the film, as what seem like simple changes are far more drastic than they first appear. However, if you’ve never seen the movie, I’d recommend you go out and get a copy now, and if a production of the play ever comes to a theatre near you, book a ticket. Both stage and screen versions are more than worth the effort, as despite the difference they both present utterly fascinating characters, even if one is easier to enjoy, while the other is more difficult but leaves an impact that lasts for days.

TIM ISAAC

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