"What's that smell in this room? Didn't you notice it, Brick?
Didn't you notice the powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room?"

-Burl Ives, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof


Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a distinctive drama, set in the sweltering twilight of a Tennessee plantation. Burl Ives plays the dying Big Daddy, the head of a grand estate and the master of the play's domain. (You'll never listen to those Burl Ives' Christmas albums in quite the same way ever again.) With the help of some bitter medicine and some inward reflection, Big Daddy and his youngest sun, Brick
(Paul Newman) succeed in tearing down the shallow walls that they and their families have lived behind for decades.
Whenever I see a play that has been adapted into a movie, I find myself captivated at how play-like the movies always are. Still cameras, long
scenes, and big sets are the tell-tale sings that the movie you are watching was formerly something else.

Conspicuously missing from this play adaptation are all references to homosexual love that were present in Tennessee William's original play.

These elements have been so completely erased, that this essential and contingent theme is not even alluded to anywhere in the proin the film. Its absence is to the detriment of the film as it leaves ambiguity and to a general deflation the climactic events of the third act.

Conventional wisdom attributes this omission to a 1934 Hollywood film code that MGM and other studios adhered to during the "Golden Age" of American

cinema. Yet this self-imposed ban was largely rendered obsolete with a 1952 Supreme Court ruling which protected filmmaker's right to free speech. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof wasn't filmed until six years after the ruling, at a time when other filmmakers had been breaking the code for years and its infringement meant something far less than legal, moral, and financial ruin for the studio.

So why would the producers choose to remove such a large part of a widely successful and popular screenplay? Perhaps it has
something to do with the long and lingering odor of mendacity.

-Ryan Douglas