I first came across Cat on a Hot Tin Roof when I watched Richard Brooks’ 1958 film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman on a plane to or from Italy. I remember it striking me so much that I wanted to watch it again, but I couldn’t ascertain why, and I couldn’t find it anywhere to stream for free. After over a year of thinking about it, I finally rented it and watched it twice in a row during the 48-hour rental period. A week later, I read the original play by Tennessee Williams. Twice in three days. It’s not because I enjoyed the play as much as the film, but because I wanted to analyze the differences.
The play and the film are almost entirely two different stories. The characters have the same names, they share the same basic plot points, they share a theme of mendacity, but the main message and the way the characters are portrayed are very different. The film is a much censored version of the play, watered down and adjusted to appeal to a larger audience, and I’m afraid that in that case, I am indeed one of the masses, one of whom Williams accused of being “squeamish about a naked study of life,” because I much preferred the movie.
Upon my rewatches of the film, I realized why I was so fascinated by it. It was never the story or plot that especially appealed to me. But it’s one of the few films that feels literary to me. I can’t think of another one that feels so much like an art piece. I realize that film itself is an art form, and acting, directing, lighting, etc. are forms of artistic expression, but I don’t think films resonate with me in that way. I watch more for entertainment whereas I read for appreciation, but in this film, I felt like there were a lot of literary elements for me to unpack. It was full of metaphors, symbolism, and little details to notice. A lot of those elements unsurprisingly originated in the play, but it’s how those elements impacted the story that made me appreciate the film so much, and the play uses them differently.
The basic shared story is about an estranged married couple, Brick and Maggie, celebrating Big Daddy’s birthday (Brick’s dad), who does not know that this will be his last since he is dying of terminal cancer. Over the explosive course of the film and play, we find out why Brick and Maggie are estranged and how Big Daddy and his family react to his revealed diagnosis.
I think the main catalyst behind the differences was the differing treatment of Brick’s ambiguous sexuality. In both the play and the movie, there was an aura of suspicion surrounding the relationship between Brick and his best friend Skipper. Some people thought that they were too close; no one really doubted Skipper loved Brick except for Brick, and Brick was disgusted by the accusations. Whether his disgust was because he was heterosexual and he didn’t like people staining his pure friendship with Skipper or because he was a closeted homosexual and was ashamed is left up for interpretation in technically both the play and the film, but the leading evidence add up to different conclusions. In the film, homosexuality was only a barely there suggestion. It was still a taboo subject when the film came out, and the director wanted to appeal to a large audience. The dynamic between Maggie and Brick, which I get more into below, indicated heterosexuality, especially the way the film ends with Maggie and Brick in the bedroom. However, in the play, homosexuality is spoken about much more openly, and while Williams wanted to keep Brick’s sexuality open-ended, it’s very clear that Brick is much more indifferent to Maggie throughout their entire relationship. It’s unclear whether Brick “can’t stand” Maggie for who she is or what she implicates about him after Skipper’s death. The essay at the back of my edition by Brian Parker mentions that Williams insisted that Brick was heterosexual, though I can’t find any other mention of Williams saying that in any other scholarship, so I’m not sure that’s true. Regardless, Williams making homosexuality arguably one of the main tensions of the play and reducing Brick’s interactions with Maggie to one of supreme indifference affected everything, from the romantic dynamic to how the characters interacted and thus how sympathetic all of the characters appeared to how the theme of mendacity was portrayed.
The different dynamic between Maggie and Brick paints and repaints the entire vibe, making the film a romance and the play more of a social commentary, though the social commentary is a prevalent element of both. Something I loved about the film when I first watched it was how even though they were painfully estranged, the mutual yearning was artistically portrayed and how palpable it was communicated to the audience. In the film, you can see their yearning for each other in how Maggie fiddles with the ring on her finger in the background or how Brick caresses Maggie’s robe that’s hanging on the bathroom door. Maggie sees something seductive in his gaze in the film as she’s talking where she only sees something cold in the play. Brick can’t help but sink into Maggie’s embrace a moment when they’re fighting in the film whereas in the play, he pushes her away with no hesitation. They always feel like a unit even though they have so much emotional distance between them, like in the scene on the balcony when Maggie stands beside him while Big Daddy and Big Mama have a fight. Even though Brick doesn’t look at her and Maggie only communicates to him with her eyes, their chemistry speaks of belonging. Or when they confide in each other or read each other’s minds in the scene where Maggie finds Brick packing his suitcase and Brick tells Maggie that Big Daddy is dying. The camera almost always shows both of them even if they are on opposite sides of the room through the use of mirrors, framing one person while the other is seen in the mirror. It’s palpable, the pain between two people estranged but intrinsically linked. It’s more romantic to watch mutual longing than a one-sided, pathetic yearning confronted with total, interminable indifference that we see in the play.
In the play, Maggie is pushed more into the background and is less prevalent. She is also less desirable to both Brick and to us. Maggie doesn’t know her place as well in the play; she’s more in league with Gooper and Mae, the two annoying and insensitive people who interject themselves where they aren’t wanted. In the scene where Big Daddy calls Brick, she follows Brick into the room. In that same scene in the film, Brick does not answer Big Daddy so she goes in before him to soften his lack of attentiveness, though Brick follows a moment later. And in the confrontation scene where they tell Big Mama the truth about Big Daddy’s diagnosis, though she does understand Big Mama more than Gooper and Mae, the divisions are portrayed as distraught Big Mama vs the greedy, inconsiderate Gooper, Mae, and Maggie. She also seems less sincere in that scene to me, though she is definitely supposed to wily like a cat. But Elizabeth Taylor also delivers genuine sympathy and emotion behind Maggie’s actions.
While Maggie did appear more sincere, at the same time, she was more wily and cat-like in the film, notably in the interaction between Maggie and Skipper that was the impetus for the estrangement between Maggie and Brick. In the play, she was not the cat in the fatal interaction with Skipper. In both the play and the film, Skipper comes on to Maggie in the attempt to disprove her accusation that he was in love with her husband. In the play, she simply gives in and sleeps with Skipper to feel close to Brick: “you asked too [sic] much of people that loved you, you—superior creature—you godlike being!—And so we made love to each other to dream it was you, both of us!” There was no motive of winning back her husband like in the film, where she claims that she originally went along with Skipper to prove to Brick that Skipper wasn’t so great since he would sleep with the wife of his best friend. In the film, Brick and Skipper were still questionably close, but there was additional background that was given: Brick idolized Skipper because he viewed him as the only person he could count on because he could not respect or look up to his father. So Maggie wanted to break the strong connection between him and Skipper. She was counting on Brick to be angrier with Skipper than with her for the infidelity and to drop him, but then she got scared that Brick would in fact be angrier with her, and she panicked, not sleeping with Skipper. When watching the film, I did find these justifications flimsy. She is supposed to be smarter than to believe that her sleeping with Skipper could win back her husband, even if Brick did end up angrier with Skipper than with her. However, it was a tense situation and perhaps her desperation skewed her judgments. Regardless, I’m not completely sold on how the film tried to twist the play’s narrative. But in placing Maggie in a more active, prevalent, cat-like role, the film positioned her to have more impact on the theme of mendacity.
Mendacity is an important theme of both the film and the play. It’s the excuse that Brick gives for his alcoholism. Brick hates mendacity but cannot love or face honesty (about his relationship with Skipper) or face the mendacity within himself. The play offers only two solutions out of it: “Mendacity is a system that we live in. Liquor is one way out an’ death’s the other.” But the film ends on a different note. It adds as a third option the truth that Maggie has, a “desperate truth.” Maggie is the only one who can face truth (in both the play and the film), recognize and live with mendacity, and then turn it to her will. It’s a more conniving way to live, and Maggie has an interesting, less-than-ethical relationship with the truth, but through Elizabeth Taylor’s sincere portrayal of the character and through comparison to the alternatives in the play, it comes across as a more hopeful and even healthier solution.
The story ends with Maggie declaring to the family that she is going to have Brick’s baby, which is a flat-out lie as Brick won’t even touch her. However, over the course of the film, we see Brick slowly coming around to Maggie, learning to lean on her. Brick, who has become an alcoholic after the death of Skipper, is on crutches throughout the play and film because he had been drunkenly jumping hurdles on his high school’s football field the night before. The symbolism of the crutch and the hurdles is present in both versions of the story, but it’s utilized differently. When speaking of him jumping the hurdles, Brick says, “they got too high for me now. […] Sober I would not have tried to jump even the low ones.” Only alcohol is getting him through even the low hurdles of everyday life—he needs that crutch to avoid the pain of living just as he needs his literal crutch to walk. In the film, after the fight between Brick and Big Daddy ends, Brick’s crutch breaks, and he has to lean on Maggie literally, representing his recognition of his need for her and her attitude towards mendacity and life. At the very end of the movie, after Maggie has told the family that she’s pregnant, Brick backs her up in front of an accusatory Mae, saying admiringly that Maggie has “life in her body” and that “Truth is something desperate, and Maggie’s got it.” And then he calls Maggie upstairs to make her lie a truth. They had confronted truth and bent mendacity to their will instead of folding under it.
Williams’ ending to the play is drastically different and much less hopeful. Brick does not back Maggie up in her lie, though he also does not publicly refute it. When they go upstairs for the night, Maggie hurls his literal crutch over the balcony rail, gets rid of all the alcohol, and tells Brick that he has to sleep with her in order to make the lie true and then she’ll bring back the alcohol. He’s coerced into sex, is still entirely indifferent to Maggie, and is still reliant on both his literal and metaphorical crutches.
I do agree that the transformation of Brick in the movie might have been too quick of a transformation in the course of a day. As Brian Parker writes in the essay in the back of my edition, I’m sure Brooks wanted to show an altered character, whereas Williams always believed that “they could only reveal what was basic and unchanging in a personality.” Though it’s doubtful whether the transformation would last in the movie version, it was overall much more hopeful than the coerced sex ending of the play.
In making the film more appealing to a mass audience, they also made the majority of the characters more sympathetic. We’ve already discussed Maggie’s character, but Big Mama, Big Daddy, Brick, and even Gooper are all more likeable in the film to varying degrees. Big Mama is so much less dignified than in the movie, and I much prefer Judith Anderson’s portrayal of her, especially in the scene where Big Mama tells Big Daddy that he never believed that she loved him, but she always did. It’s a statement in the film, but it’s a revelation in the play as Big Mama is surprised and hurt by the implication of Big Daddy’s that she just married him for the money. And that makes her pitiful for the rest of the play. The parallels between her and Maggie in their relationships with their husbands are strengthened in the film since Big Mama is less silly. They identify with each other because they are both in love with men who do not love them in return. Blind devotion and posturing to avoid the pain had been their mode of conduct: “When old couples have been together as long as me and Big Daddy, they get irritable with each other from…from too much…devotion.”
In the play, Brick just learns that Big Daddy is dying and all he wants is for his father to shut up. He does not much care that revealing his cancer would hurt Big Daddy, whereas in the film he tells Maggie with guilt, “I hurt him.” Big Daddy is cruder and meaner, and he never treats Big Mama better or as anything other than an imposition, whereas in the film we see a transformation similar to Brick’s where he tries to change his behavior and treat his wife and his workers with more appreciation. His character was also less believable in the play. I found it hard to believe that Big Daddy, so straight and crudely sexual, would be so tolerant of the idea that Brick was even potentially gay, given how little he shows tolerance even of his own wife’s and first son’s presence.
Something else I enjoyed about the film was that there was a mystery element in how they drew out the reveals of why Maggie and Brick are estranged and Big Daddy’s diagnosis. The majority of the family outside of Big Daddy and Big Mama find out about Big Daddy’s diagnosis at varying points throughout the film, but in the play, pretty much the entire family knows at the start. In the film, the audience is kept in the dark for the majority of the movie about why Maggie and Brick are estranged. It’s only really revealed in an explosive conversation in the latter third of the movie. In the play, it’s revealed in Act One. I was a bit confused throughout the first two-thirds of the film the first time I watched it, but I enjoyed the process of figuring it out.
All this isn’t to say I didn’t have any objections to the film version. As I’ve mentioned, I found Maggie’s justification of seducing Skipper flimsy, the quick transformation of Brick unrealistic, and I also found the basement scene in the film boring (though I like the additions of Big Daddy’s hobo father and his legacy of love, and the part where Brick starts breaking things and Maggie runs to the basement but doesn’t go down the stairs, which I thought again showed Maggie’s recognition of her place). But that was really the only scene where I lost interest, whereas the abundant irrelevant chatter in the play version was often dull. Something I did really like about the play were all the parallels. I often put little annotations in my book, directing myself to “see page such-and-such” to point out repetitions or parallels between characters. I thought that was really well done on Williams’ part, and though I preferred how the characters were portrayed in the film, Williams did know how to write strong characters with depth.
I think that reading and watching both versions is valuable, if only for the sake of comparison and analysis. They both make for interesting character studies, if for different reasons. The story has never been the main attraction for me, but it’s really a great topic for a play, exploring the guilt of knowing that love for you was the reason for someone else’s suicide, wondering how to live with the mendacity and pretense of the world, the pain of such devotion to unrequited love, the commitment to living like a cat on a hot tin roof.
