Tennessee Williams regarded the making of a play as both a profoundly personal and inescapably collaborative enterprise, conceived by the playwright but shaped by contributions from directors, producers, and other participants in the creative process. Screen adaptations carry this reality a step further, and an intellectually inclined auteur of the order of Richard Brooks was bound to exert a powerful influence on the contours of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, even as he respected many vital properties of the hugely successful stage version. As the playwright Edward Albee has observed, this drama is almost as famous for its revisions as for its final text, and in fact there is no definitively final text, since Williams kept tinkering with it as decades passed. He was less than fond of Brooks's rendering, which premiered in August 1958, but he was surely pleased with its enthusiastic reception, and for Brooks the project merged seamlessly into the remarkable decade of literature-related creativity that started with The Brothers Karamazov, released just six months earlier, and concluded with In Cold Blood in 1967.

Like its source, the film centers largely on the physically stalled marriage of morose, alcoholic Brick (Paul Newman) and sensual, frustrated Maggie (Elizabeth Taylor), leading many observers to regard it as a study of a troubled young man's veiled homosexuality. Yet while that interpretation is useful, Williams had a deeper agenda, using a domestic situation rife with misunderstanding and mendacity as grist for a poetic essay on the meanings and mechanisms of memory, which are thrown into relief as Brick and Maggie struggle with fraught recollections of a dead friend, whose neediness and vulnerability they feel they once betrayed, and with the larger-than-life presence of Big Daddy (Burl Ives), a dying patriarch whose history reflects the decadent sway of capitalism, clannishness, and masculine entitlement. Its compromises notwithstanding, Brooks's film brings these themes to the screen with intelligence and force.

PHASES

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof passed through many phases on its way from Williams's imagination to Brooks's cameras and thence to movie theaters in the United States and beyond. It originated as a short story titled “Three against Grenada,” which Williams wrote during a time of heavy drinking, loneliness, self-hatred, and bewilderment—a miserable “term in Purgatory,” he called it—and later revised as “Three Players of a Summer Game,” published in The New Yorker in 1952.