Alicia Malone on the history of CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF | TIFF 2022

Alicia Malone on Richard Brooks’ film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ literary classic CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF.

This Oscar-nominated adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ Pulitzer Prize​​–winning play proved a fateful shoot for Elizabeth Taylor: falling ill a week into filming, she decided not to accompany her husband Mike Todd in his plane Lucky Liz, which crashed en route to New York, killing everyone aboard. The distraught Taylor nevertheless managed to deliver one of her best performances as the feline, scheming Maggie, sexually frustrated wife of Paul Newman’s booze-sodden Brick Pollitt. A one-time football star and scion of a moneyed Southern family, Brick now nurses a broken leg and a secret hurt (an attraction to friend Skipper in the original play, but not in this bowdlerized version) while the rest of his dysfunctional family plot to inherit the estate of expiring family patriarch Big Daddy (Burl Ives). Spitting catty barbs about her avaricious in-laws and their “no-neck monster” children, Maggie torments Brick with her simultaneously unfettered and thwarted sexuality, flaunting Big Daddy’s attraction to her: “I think it’s mighty fine the way that ol’ fellow on the doorstep of death still takes in my shape with what I consider deserved appreciation.”

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