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DVD Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Elizabeth Taylor has never been sexier than as Tennessee Williams's hot-blooded Maggie "The Cat" Pollitt, prowling around her boudoir in a slinky white slip. That's how you know her alcoholic, ex-football-player husband, Brick (Paul Newman), must have more than just his leg in a cast. It's the 65th birthday of wealthy (but dying) southern patriarch Big Daddy (Burl Ives), and his sons Gooper (Jack Carter) and Brick have come to suck up to him for $10 million in inheritance money. Gooper is a family man and father to a brood of "no-neck monsters"; youngest boy Brick is papa's favorite (as if you couldn't tell from the fellow's names), but hasn't sired progeny. Maggie is definitely in heat, but Brick refuses to sleep with her because he suspects her her of being unfaithful with his best friend, who recent committed suicide. Although toned down for the movies, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is vintage Tennessee Williams. The film was directed by Richard Brooks (In Cold Blood, Blackboard Jungle, Elmer Gantry). --Jim Emerson
There were three outstanding and bold films that faced without hindrances that thorny subject in the crudest possible way, resisting the attacks of the Moral league: Baby doll, Anatomy of a murder and this one. In the Fifties Decade: the most of filmmakers bet for one of these three options: science fiction, Noir Film or dense emotional conflicts. Of course, there were exceptions: Billy Wilder left behind his sarcastic irony with Sunset Boulevard in 1950 and decided to smile with Stalag 17 and Someone like it hot (curiously The Best Comedy in the Century), but Stanley Kramer, Otto Preminger, Elia Kazan , Samuel Fuller, Nicholas Ray and Richard Brooks were the most relevant social scalpel of the society along that dark decade.
Superb, complex and mature existential conflict around a woman who wants to be loved and her extremely heat and soul wounded husband, whose inner demons have him struggled swimming in alcohol; add to this hell the familiar pressure. Burl Ives gives an outstanding performance featuring the father in law of the grieved Miss Taylor.
Another sonorous adaptation of Tennessee Williams, who naked the soul of the North American society in the most intimate details.
Bernard Shaw wrote once: "There are married women who have not husband, while there are single women whom seem to surplus them; and one asks oneself what is better or worst: if not being corresponded by a legitimate right that belongs her or being corresponded by many rights that do not belong her."
It's sad that this is not the play Williams wrote. See the other version too.
This play is about a woman trying to redeem her husband who is drinking himself to ruin because he can't deal with the fact that he was in love with his dead football buddy - another man. If you want to see that story, consider getting the Rip Torn and Jessica Lange version from the '80s. The Paul Newman version was made in a time when it wasn't OK for Maggie to try to help her man own up to his love for his friend, so instead, the story became about her trying to save him from alcoholism. This is a much less dramatic topic, and it's frankly dull and offensive to a beautifully written story. It's like telling "Little Red Riding Hood" as a story about the perils of packing a picnic basket, without any mention of a big bad wolf. If you want to see the fabulous play Williams actually wrote, get the more modern one. If you just want to look at great acting and beautiful people in a badly mangled, lame story, get this one.
"The truth is something desperate."
Mendacity is the theme of this excellent movie (and Tennessee Williams play). Paul Newman is a drunk and won't sleep with his wife (Elizabeth Taylor) because he thinks she's slept with his best friend years before. (She is beautiful; he must be crazy!) Burl Ives plays Big Daddy, who is dying of cancer and has everyone sucking up to him for his inheritance (except Newman, of course). He and Newman go mano a mano in the basement filled with junk and old memories, and both discover what love is. The film is filled with symbols (Newman's crutch, for example), and although it's obviously based on a play, the movie is not as stagey as it could have been. Worth a watch.
Looking for a benchmark in movie acting? Breakthrough performances don't come much more electrifying than Marlon Brando's animalistic turn as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. Sweaty, brutish, mumbling, yet with the balanced grace of a prizefighter, Brando storms through the role--a role he had originated in the Broadway production of Tennessee Williams's celebrated play. Stanley and his wife, Stella (as in Brando's oft-mimicked line, "Hey, Stellaaaaaa!"), are the earthy couple in New Orleans's French Quarter whose lives are upended by the arrival of Stella's sister, Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh). Blanche, a disturbed, lyrical, faded Southern belle, is immediately drawn into a battle of wills with Stanley, beautifully captured in the differing styles of the two actors.... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Vivien Leigh - Marlon Brando Director(s): Elia Kazan DVD Release Date: Released the 18 May 1999 Usually ships in 8 to 10 days
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Paul Newman has his glorious youthful swagger in this southern-fried melodrama, which marked his first picture with Joanne Woodward (they married after shooting ended). The script is a melange of William Faulkner stories, although it appears more under the influence of Tennessee Williams and Picnic than the Nobel Prize winner. Drifter Newman catches the eye of schoolmarm Woodward and her father, a rural Mississippi bigshot (Orson Welles). This is not one of Welles's better moments; he appears to be conducting make-up experiments. There is some enjoyable flapdoodle along the way, in the Freud-meets-Gone with the Wind manner of '50s southern cooking, but the ending is embarrassingly compromised. The same production team would leave out the box-office concessions a few years... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Paul Newman - Joanne Woodward Director(s): Martin Ritt DVD Release Date: Released the 20 May 2003 Usually ships in 24 hours
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After his successful direction of the Broadway hits Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple, Mike Nichols made his filmmaking debut with this outstanding and still-powerful screen adaptation (by Ernest Lehman) of Edward Albee's taboo-shattering play. In their fourth film together (and by far their finest), Richard Burton and Oscar winner Elizabeth Taylor play a New England couple whose marriage hangs by a thin thread of self-deception, vicious verbal jousting, and embittered mutual need. George Segal and Sandy Dennis (who also won an Oscar) play the younger, unsuspecting couple who awkwardly witness the devastating rivalry of their hosts. Handling adult themes with intelligence and forceful dramatic impact, this was the film that finally shattered Hollywood's self-censoring... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Elizabeth Taylor - Richard Burton Director(s): Mike Nichols DVD Release Date: Released the 18 May 1999 Usually ships in 24 hours
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This black-and-white film adaptation of Tennessee Williams's Southern gothic play is perhaps more famous for the rumored off-screen shenanigans of its stars than for its over-the-top repressed sexuality (only Williams could pull off that paradox, and pull it off he does). Supposedly, stars Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor battled for screen time; Hepburn warred very publicly with director Joseph Mankiewicz; and a postaccident Montgomery Clift relied heavily on painkillers and support from friend Taylor during the grueling shoot. Even this, however, cannot top the events of the film itself, revolving around the unseen playboy Sebastian and his mysterious death, which has something to do with young boys, a decadent European vacation, and Taylor in a provocative wet, white bathing... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Elizabeth Taylor - Katharine Hepburn - Montgomery Clift Director(s): Joseph L. Mankiewicz DVD Release Date: Released the 15 August 2000 Usually ships in 24 hours
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"I was the slut of all time!" declares Elizabeth Taylor in the role for which she won her first Academy Award®. Taylor plays Gloria, a model of loose morals who discovers a last chance at love and redemption when she spends a week with Weston Ligget (Laurence Harvey), a man who married into money and hates himself for it. They fall in love, but before they can find happiness they have to overcome their own worst natures. BUtterfield 8 (named after Gloria's answering service) is a big boozy melodrama, full of gorgeous clothes, catty comments, and emotional showdowns--but along the way it plumbs some genuine sadness. No one can be simultaneously overblown and utterly sincere like Elizabeth Taylor; the movie is mired in the morality of the time, but her performance... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Elizabeth Taylor - Laurence Harvey - Eddie Fisher Director(s): Daniel Mann DVD Release Date: Released the 19 September 2000 Usually ships in 24 hours
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