Cat On a Hot Tin Roof

(Richard Brooks, US 1958, 108 min., 16mm)

Senior Matinee. One of the very best of the many film adaptations of Tennessee Williams’ plays, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof received six Oscar nominations and made “mendacity” a household word. Burl Ives stars as Big Daddy, the cantankerous patriarch of a southern family whose children are forever scheming and screaming as they squabble over the old man’s inheritance. More conniving than the others, daughter-in-law Elizabeth Taylor attempts to provide an heir for the inheritance by pleading to have a child by her husband, Paul Newman, whose morbid self-absorption and complete uninterest in his wife’s allure signals the much more profound dysfunction of the entire family.