An adaptation of Tennessee William’s play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof sets the stage for fine on screen Southern fried melodrama.

This comes courtesy of the dissension between the members of a volatile Southern family, who cleanse long standing disputes via chunky pieces of dialogue, while shacked up in a large southern mansion on a hot and rainy night.

The film centres on the wealthy and influential Pollitt family, whose aging patriarch, the no nonsense Big Daddy (Burt Ives), is dying of cancer.

For his son Cooper (Jack Carson) and irritating daughter in law Mae (Madeline Sherwood), his death means that they are in line to inherit his vast estate, since they are parents to a large brood of quite possibly the most annoying brats to disgrace the silver screen.

However, his other –and obviously much favourable – son, Brick (Paul Newman), has made it clear that he does not want any of his father’s fortune, with the former high school stud more content staring into the bottom of a bottle, than take over as top dog of the Pollitt clan.

Brick is married to Maggie “The Cat” (Elizabeth Taylor). She is unfulfilled sexually and emotionally by Brick, who resists her sexual advances and scoffs at her need to have a child, which has brought on its own social stigma in her upper class, conservative surroundings.

Maggie’s frustration towards Brick will be shared by most male viewers, who would love nothing more than to grab Brick’s liquor bottle and break it other his head. And who could blame them after watching an in prime Taylor writhing saucily for her husband.   

Yet, to call their relationship problematic would be an understatement. While she may long for him, he can’t stand the sight of her. This is due to Brick’s belief that Maggie contributed to the suicide of his best friend.

However, this differs greatly from the plays insistence that Brick was indeed struggling with feelings of homosexuality towards his best friend, and could not commit towards Maggie sexually until he knew where he stood as a man, straight or otherwise.  

As a result, the bitterness and disharmony showed on screen is tragic, and is made even more so by a final act of purging from Brick, who lets his emotions loose in a heartbreaking scene, scolding his father for his inability to show love, while proclaiming himself to be worthless. 

It is a fine piece of acting by Newman, the Southern gentlemen portraying his fragile and haunted character with an unparalleled amount of soul, which he had imbedded in many of his characters.