Today would have been director Stuart Rosenberg’s 98th birthday. Our scene of the day come from one of Rosenberg’s best-known and best-remembered films, 1967’s Cool Hand Luke.
This is a scene that featured the line that’s been kept alive by cops, drill sergeants, and angry teachers to this day.
ÀW
If you grew up in the 80s or 90s, you probably had at least one friend whose father kept a pool table in the garage. This movie was probably the reason why.
Fast Eddie Felson (Paul Newman) was once The Hustler, the legendary pool player who recovered from having his fingers broken with a bowling ball and went on to defeat the legendary Minnesota Fats. That was a long time ago. Now, Fast Eddie is a slick liquor salesman in Chicago. Eddie stills hangs out at the pool halls, despite his bad memories of the game. When he sees a cocky young player named Vincent (Tom Cruise) and his girlfriend Carmen (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), he takes them under his wing and teaches them how to hustle. It’s not always easy because Vincent doesn’t like to lose, even if it means a chance to score an even bigger victory later on. Eddie finds himself being drawn back into the game, even as he starts to wonder who is hustling who.
I always forget that The Color of Money is a Martin Scorsese films. It’s a film that Scorsese made at a time when he had a reputation for only being able to make art films that critics loved but audiences stayed away from. After the box office failure of The King of Comedy and his abortive first attempt to make The Last Temptation of Christ, Scorsese took The Color of Money to prove that he could work with a studio. This is a Disney Scorsese film, with his signature camera moves but not much of his religious torment. Even if it’s not one of his personal films, Scorsese makes pool look exciting, a battle that is as much about psychology as physicality. Watching The Color of Money, you can smell the chalk on the tip of the pool cue.
Scorsese brings the seedy pool halls to life but it’s Paul Newman’s performance that dominates. The Color of Money won Newman his first and only Oscar and he deserved it. Newman had first played Fast Eddie Felson in 1961, in The Hustler. Returning to the role twenty-five years later allowed Newman to show what would eventually happen to the angry young men that he played in the 60s. Eddie has grown up and he’s got a comfortable life but he’s not content. He finally has stability but he misses the game. He needs the thrill of the hustle. Newman is at his best in The Color of Money, building on The Hustler but also revealing new sides of Eddie Felson.
Newman is so good that Tom Cruise often gets overlooked but both Cruise and Mastrantonio hold their own against Paul Newman. Cruise especially does a good job as Vincent, playing him as someone who is too cocky for his own good but also not as dumb as he looks. Just when you think you’ve got Vincent figured out, Cruise surprises you. The Color of Money came out the same year as Top Gun and Cruise’s Vincent feels like a commentary on the talented, troubled, but cocky characters that Cruise was playing at that time. Cruise, Scorsese, and Newman make a good team in this more-than-worthy sequel.
1976’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson takes place in the waning years of the Old West. Civilization is coming to America and the “wild” west’s days are numbered. And yet, even as the days of outlaws and gunslingers come to an end, America is already in the process of building up its own mythology.
Buffalo Bill (Paul Newman) owns a popular wild west show, one where his stars put on a show that claims to recreate the great moments of western history. The show is made up of a motely collection of performers, some of whom are more talented than others. This is a Robert Altman film and, as usual, the emphasis is more on watching how his large ensemble of actors interact as opposed to highlighting any one actor. Indeed, it can be hard to keep everyone in the film straight and one gets the feeling that this was intentional on Altman’s part. Buffalo Bill and the Indians may be a revisionist western and a satire of American history but it’s also a showbiz film. The emphasis is on people continually coming and going, sticking around long enough to either prove their worth as a performer or moving on to a hopefully more receptive audience.
Geraldine Chaplin plays Annie Oakley, the sharp shooter who takes joy in firing her gun and who barely seems to notice that her husband (John Considine) is terrified of getting shot. Joel Grey serves as the unflappable manager of the show while Harvey Keitel is miscast as Buffalo Bill’s somewhat nerdy assistant. (Keitel, with his natural intensity, seems like he’s desperately waiting for a chance to explode, a chance that never really comes.) Burt Lancaster plays Ned Buntline, the writer who made Buffalo Bill into a celebrity and who provides a somewhat sardonic commentary as Bill’s current activities. Shelley Duvall shows up as the wife of President Grover Cleveland (played by Pat McCormick), who comes to the show and is amused until an Indian points a gun towards the president.
Throughout it all, Buffalo Bill enjoys his fame and pushes his vision of the Old West on those who come to see his show. Newman plays Bill as being a blowhard, an eccentric who is obsessed with opera and whose entire persona is a fake. He can’t shoot straight. He can barely ride a horse. His trademark long hair is actually a wig. The only people who take Bill seriously as those who come to see his show. Those who know him view him as being a buffoon but they also understand that he’s a very successful and very famous buffoon and that ultimately matters more than any sort of historical truth.
What conflict there is in the film occurs when Sitting Bull (Frank Kaquitts) and his translator (Will Sampson) arrive on the scene. Sitting Bull has agreed to appear in the show but only under his own terms. Buffalo Bill grows frustrated with Sitting Bull and his refusal to pretend to be a savage but he also knows that this audience wants to see the last remaining great Indian chief.
It’s a big and sprawling film and it’s really not entirely successful. Altman was an intelligent director who was willing to take risks and no one deserves more credit for popularizing the idea of the ensemble film. That said, he could also be a bit heavy-handed and that’s certainly the case here. It takes a certain amount of courage to cast a star like Paul Newman as a thoroughly unlikable character and it also took a bit of courage on Newman’s part to give the performance that he did. At the same time, neither the shallow Buffalo Bill nor the dignified Sitting Bull are really compelling enough characters to carry a film that runs for more than two hours. The film’s message is an obvious one and it’s also one that Altman handled in a much more memorable way with Nashville.
That said, the film is a memorable misfire. It’s at its best when it abandons the politics and just concentrates on the community of performers that popular Buffalo Bill’s show. The film’s best moments are not the ones with Paul Newman growling but instead the ones with John Considine hoping that Geraldine Chaplin won’t accidentally shoot him. As with many of Altman’s film, Buffalo Bill and the Indians works best when it focuses on the misfit community at the center of its story.
First released in 1960 and based on a novel by Leon Uris, Otto Preminger’s Exodous is two films in one.
The first half of the film takes place in Cyprus in the days immediately following World War II. A young war widow named Kitty (Eva Marie Saint) is sightseeing when she learns of the Karaolos Internment Camp, where the British are interning thousands of Jewish refugees who demand to be allowed to go to the land that will eventually become the State of Israel. Kitty visits with General Sutherland (Ralph Richardson), who oversees the camp and who is rumored to secretly be Jewish because of his relatively benevolent attitude towards the internees. Disgusted by the anti-Semitism displayed by many of the British officers (one of whom is played by Kennedy in-law Peter Lawford), Kitty volunteers at the camp and learns about the Holocaust from those who survived it. She also meets Ari Ben Caanan (Paul Newman), a former officer in the British army. Ari manages to get control of a cargo ship, one that is renamed Exodus. Six hundred refugees stage a hunger strike, vowing that they will willingly starve to death rather than be returned to Europe.
The second part of Exodus takes place in what will become the modern State of Israel. It follows Ari, Kitty, and several of the passengers of the Exodus as they adjust to life and continue to fight for a land of their own, despite the opposition of the British and much of the rest of the world. Karen (Jill Haworth) is a young woman who searches for her father, a brilliant man who has been driven into a nearly catatonic state by the horrors of the Holocaust. Dov Landau (Sal Mineo) is an explosives expert who survived Auschwitz as a Sonderkommando and who was repeatedly raped by the guards at the camp. Dov joins the Irgun, a paramilitary organization that the British consider to be terrorists. Leading the Irgun is Ari’s uncle, Akiva (David Opatoshu), and Dov soon finds himself being targeted by both the British and the Arabs who, despite the moderating efforts of men like Taha (John Derek, who would later direct Ghosts Can’t Do It), want to violently force the Jews out of the land.
Legend has it that, after a private screening on Exodus, comedian Mort Sahl turned to director Otto Preminger and said, “Otto, let my people go.” And it’s true that Exodus is a very long film. Preminger, who started out making film noirs like Laura, spent the latter part of his career making “important” epics and, like many Golden Age directors struggling to compete with television and the 60s counterculture, he tended to make long, star-studded films that dealt with current events and which pushed the envelope just enough to be controversial without actually being radical. However, I would argue that the three-hour running time of Exodus is justified. To understand why Ari, Dov, Karen, and the other passengers of the Exodus would rather risk their lives by staying in what will become the State of Israel, one has to understand both what they went through to get there and also the anti-Semitism that they faced even in post-World War II Europe. If Exodus were made today, it would be a mini-series. Since it was made in 1960, it was instead a 3-hour film with an intermission.
Exodus holds up relatively well, with the sprawling action anchored by the presence of a cast of familiar faces. Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint bring a good deal of movie star glamour to scenes that would have otherwise just been dry exposition. The film’s heart truly belongs to Jill Haworth and Sal Mineo, both of whom bring two life characters who have very differing views of the world. Karen remains an optimist, one who is convinced that people can live together. Dov, fueled by his own guilt and anger, has no room for negotiations and compromises. Mineo received his second and last Oscar nomination for his performance in Exodus, though he lost to Peter Ustinov’s showy turn in Spartacus. Exodus itself was clearly made with a hope for Oscar glory. While Exodus did pick up a handful of nominations, it was left out of the five movie Best Picture slate. The Academy only had room for one historical epic and they went for John Wayne’s The Alamo. The eventual winner was The Apartment, the best of the nominated films. (Indeed, even if Exodus had taken the Alamo’s spot, The Apartment would still be the best of the nominees.) The Oscars aside, Exodus remains a good example of the type of epic filmmaking that once defined the Hollywood studios.
Today would have been Paul Newman’s 100th birthday!
For today’s scene that I love, we have Paul Newman winning a fight in 1969’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
“There aren’t any rules for a knife fight.”
Paul Newman as San Francisco Police Detective Harry “Dirty Harry” Callahan?
Today, it sounds unthinkable that the outspokenly liberal Newman could ever have been a contender for the role of Harry Callahan, a police detective who is quick with a quip but even quicker on the trigger. As everyone knows, Clint Eastwood played Harry and, as a result, he finally became as big of a star in the United States as he already was in Europe. Today, it’s impossible to imagine anyone other than Clint Eastwood torturing the Scorpio Killer for information and then announcing himself to be “all torn up about his rights.” Just try to imagine Paul Newman snarling as reflexively as Clint Eastwood did upon hearing that the whiny guy in the liberal office taught constitutional law at Berkeley. Try to imagine Paul Newman calling someone “a punk” or bragging about the power of his gun. It can’t be done.
And yet, as hard as it is to believe, Clint Eastwood was not the first choice for Harry Callahan. In fact, Eastwood apparently wasn’t even on Warner Bros.’s list of contenders when they initially bought the rights for the script that would eventually become Dirty Harry.
Written by Harry Julian Fink and Rita M. Fink, that script was originally called Dead Right and it took place in New York. In the original script, Harry Callahan was world-weary, veteran New York cop, in his 50s and just a few months away from retirement. In the original script, Harry pursued a serial killer named Travis. When Warner Bros. bought the script in 1969, they viewed it as being a potential vehicle for Frank Sinatra with Irvin Kershner directing. (Kershner is probably best remembered for later directing The Empire Strikes Back.) As was his habit, Sinatra immediately demanded rewriters. John Milius wrote three drafts, each one expanding on the idea of Callahan as a rebel against the system. Terrence Malick (yes, that Terrence Malick) was also brought it and came up with a storyline in which the serial killer would specifically be targeting mobsters and other people who had escaped justice. Somewhere, amongst all the rewrites, the action moved from New York to Seattle.
After all that effort, why didn’t Frank Sinatra play Harry Callahan? Reportedly, he broke his hand and, as a result, he was told that he wouldn’t be able to hold a microphone or a gun or anything else while it was healing. Since you really can’t have Harry Callahan without a gun, Sinatra left the project and Irvin Kershner went with him.
While trying (unsuccessfully) to recruit Sidney Pollack as their new director, Warner Bros. searched for a new leading man. Reportedly, the script ended up on John Wayne’s desk. Wayne later said that he turned down the role because he felt the violence was gratuitous. Other sources indicate that John Wayne actually was interested in the role but that the studio didn’t consider him to be contemporary enough. (After the success of Dirty Harry, Wayne would play a similar cop character in McQ and would provide a hint of what Dirty Harry starring John Wayne would have been like.) Burt Lancaster turned down the role because he didn’t like the script’s politics. Lee Marvin and Robert Mitchum both turned down the role because they refused to play cops. George C. Scott reportedly refused the role because of the violence. Marlon Brando was considered but, probably wisely, was never approached.
Having been turned down by all of the older tough guys, Warner Bros. went with the younger tough guys. Steve McQueen turned down the role because he had already played a cop in Bullitt and he felt the critics would accuse him of repeating himself. (He was probably right.) Paul Newman refused the role on political grounds but, as he often tended to do whenever he turned down a role, he also recommended another actor for the part. That actor was Clint Eastwood who was an old friend of Newman’s and who, obviously, had no problems with the film’s politics.
(Let’s take a moment to give some respect to Paul Newman, who was reportedly one of the nicest guys in Hollywood.)
Once Eastwood was on board, his requested that his friend and frequent collaborator, director Don Siegel, be hired to direct the film. The script was again rewritten, moving the action to San Francisco and making Harry into a far less talkative character. The serial killer known as Travis became the serial killer known as Scorpio. The idea of the killer targeting criminals was abandoned at Siegel’s insistence, though Eastwood liked the idea enough to use it for Dirty Harry’s first sequel, Magnum Force.
Audie Murphy
Originally, James Caan was approached for the role of Scorpio but Caan turned it down (which, of course, left him free to play Sonny in The Godfather). Perhaps most intriguingly, Audie Murphy was offered the role. Murphy was one of the most decorated combat soldiers of World War II. He had gone from the Army to appearing in movies. By the time Dirty Harry went into production, Murphy was largely appearing in B-westerns and was as known for his temper as his films. (He was acquitted of attempted murder shortly before filming began on Dirty Harry. Murphy said that his anger issues were largely due to the trauma of World War II and he was one of the first prominent people to openly speak about what has since become known as PTSD.) Murphy undoubtedly would have been an intimidating Scorpio but he died in a plane crash before he could accept or refuse the role.
Instead, the role went to Andrew Robinson, who an unknown at the time. He was also, in real life, a pacifist who had difficulty not flinching whenever he had to fire a rifle in the film. That said, Robinson gave a brilliantly unhinged performance as Scorpio and reportedly had to get an unlisted telephone number because of all the angry and threatening phone calls that he received after the movie was released.
Now, I have to admit that I personally find the idea of Frank Sinatra/James Caan or, for that matter, a John Wayne/Audie Murphy police procedural to be kind of intriguing. And goodness know, I would certainly like a chance to see Marlon Brando doing the “do you feel lucky, punk?” speech. In the end, though, I think things turned out for the best.
During the lawless day of the old west, a drifter named Roy Bean (Paul Newman) wanders into the desolate town of Vinegaroon, Texas. When he enters the local saloon, he meets the vagrants who run the town. They beat him, they rob him, and they tie him to the back of his horse and leave him to die.
Bean, however, does not die. Instead, he’s nursed back to health by a beautiful young woman named Maria Elena (Victoria Principal). Carrying a gun, Bean reenters the saloon and promptly kills nearly everyone who previously attacked him. (“I’m not done killing you yet!” Bean yells at one fleeing woman.) Bean sits down in front of the saloon and waits for justice. Instead, he’s visited by a lecherous traveling preacher (Anthony Perkins), who buries the dead and gives Bean absolution. Bean declares that he is now the “law of the West Pecos.” As the preacher leaves, he looks at the audience and says that he never visited Bean again and later died of dysentery in Mexico. He hasn’t seen Bean since dying so the preacher is sure that, wherever Bean went, it wasn’t Heaven.
Judge Roy Bean dispenses rough and hard justice from his saloon and renames the town Langtry, after the actress Lillie Langtry. Bean has never met Langtry or even seen her perform but he writes to her regularly and pictures of her decorate the walls of his saloon. Bean hires outlaws to serve as his town marshals and sentences prostitutes to remain in town and marry the citizens. Lawbreakers are left hanging outside of the saloon. Bean enters into a common law marriage with Maria and, for a while, they even own a bear, who drinks beer and helps Bean maintain order in the court. Bean may be crazy but his methods clean up the town and Langtry starts to grow. As Langtry becomes more civilized and an attorney named Arthur Gass (Roddy McDowall) grows more powerful, it starts to become apparent that there may no longer be a place for a man like Judge Roy Bean.
The real-life Judge Roy Bean did hold court in a saloon and he did name the town after Lilly Langtry. It’s debatable whether or not he was really a hanging judge. Because he didn’t have a jail, the maximum punishment that he could hand out was a fine and usually that fine was the same amount of however much money the accused had on him at the time of his arrest. Because of his eccentricities and his reputation for being the “only law west of the Pecos,” Roy Bean became a legendary figure. The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean acknowledges from the start that it’s not a historically accurate, with a title card that reads, “Maybe this isn’t the way it was… it’s the way it should have been.”
Based on a script by John Milius and directed by Hollywood veteran John Huston, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean is one of the strangest westerns to ever be released by a major studio. Featuring multiple narrators who occasionally speak directly to the camera, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean is an episodic mix of low comedy, graphic violence, and syrupy romance. (The film’s sole Oscar nomination was for the song that played over scenes of Bean and Maria going on a romantic picnic with their pet bear.) Familiar faces show up in small roles. Along with Perkins and McDowall, Tab Hunter, Ned Beatty, Jacqueline Bissett, Ava Gardner, and Anthony Zerbe all play supporting roles. Even a heavily made-up Stacy Keach makes an appearance as an albino outlaw named Bad Bob.
Jacqueline Bisset in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean
Milius has gone on the record as calling The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean a “Beverly Hills western” and he has a point. He envisioned the script as starring Warren Oates as a less likable and much more morally ambiguous version of Judge Roy Bean and he was not happy that his original ending was replaced by a more showy pyrotechnic spectacle. Milius envisioned the film as a low-budget spaghetti western but Huston instead made a Hollywood epic, complete with celebrity cameos and a theme song from Maurice Jarre and Marilyn Bergman. Milius said that his experience with The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean is what led to him deciding to direct his own films.
Again, Milius has a point but John Huston’s version of The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean has its strengths as well. Though he may not be the madman that Milius originally envisioned, Paul Newman gives a good, grizzled performance as Roy Bean and the role served as a precursor for the type of aging but determined characters that Newman would specialize in during the final phase of his career. Due to its episodic structure, the film is uneven but it works more often than it doesn’t. The chaotic early scenes reflect a time when the west was actually wild while the later scenes are more cohesive, as society moves into Langtry and threatens to make formerly indispensable men like Roy Ban obsolete. Even the cameo performances fit in well with the film’s overall scheme, with Anthony Perkins standing out as the odd preacher. Finally, the young Victoria Principal is perfectly cast as the only woman that Roy Bean loved as much as Lily Langtry.
Though it’s impossible not to wonder what Warren Oates would have done with the title role, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean is a good end-of-the-west western.
4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!
95 years ago today, Paul Newman was born in Shaker Heights, Ohio. He would go on, of course, to become one of America’s greatest film stars, an acclaimed actor who was active from the mid-part of the 20th century to the beginning of our current century. He made his film debut in 1954 with The Silver Chalice (and subsequently paid for an ad in which he apologized for his performance in the film, which I think was a bit unnecessary as he wasn’t really that bad in the film) and he made his final onscreen appearance in 2005 in Empire Falls. (He did, however, subsequently provide the voice of Doc Hudson in Cars, along with narrating a few documentaries.) Time and again, he proved himself to be one of the best actors around. According to most report, he was also one of the nicest. When he died in 2008, the world mourned.
In honor of his cinematic legacy, here are….
4 Shots From 4 Paul Newman Films
Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (1958, dir by Richard Brooks)
Cool Hand Luke (1967, dir by Stuart Rosenberg)
The Verdict (1981, dir by Sidney Lumet)
The Hudsucker Proxy (1994, dir by the Coen Brothers)
Hockey fans are excited about this year’s Stanley Cup Finals between the Boston Bruins and the St. Louis Blues, so I figured now’s the time to take a look at the quintessential hockey movie, George Roy Hill’s SLAP SHOT. Hill and star Paul Newman, who’d previously collaborated on BUTCH CASSIDY & THE SUNDANCE KID and THE STING, reunited for this raucous, raunchy sports comedy about a failing minor league hockey team who reinvent themselves as a hard-hitting goon squad.
Newman plays Reg Dunlap, an aging rink rat now the player-coach for the Chiefs, a dying franchise in a dying mill town. The team is on a massive losing streak, and attendance is at an all-time low. Two-bit GM Joe McGrath (Newman’s COOL HAND LUKE antagonist Strother Martin) is trying to sell the Chiefs, and things look bleak until Dunlap begins taunting his opponents and the rink violence escalates. Enter a…
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The 1958 best picture nominee, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, opens with a 30-something Paul Newman doing something stupid.
It’s a testament to just how incredibly handsome Paul Newman was in the 1950s that he can still be sexy even while he’s stumbling around in a drunken haze and attempting to jump over hurdles on a high school football field. Newman is playing Brick Pollitt, youngest son of the wealthy cotton farmer Big Daddy Pollitt (Burl Ives). Brick was a star athlete in high school but now, he’s a drunk with an unhappy marriage and a lot of bitter feelings. When Brick attempts to jump over the hurdles, he breaks his ankle. The only thing that keeps Brick from being as big a loser as Biff Loman is the fact that he looks like Paul Newman.
Brick is married to Maggie (Elizabeth Taylor), a beautiful woman who may have grown up on the wrong side of the tracks but who has married into money. The only problem is that it doesn’t seem like Brick is ever going to get that money. With Big Daddy getting older, everyone in Mississippi is wondering which Pollitt son will inherit his fortune. Will it be drunken, self-pitying Brick or will it be Goober (Jack Carson) and his wife (Madeleine Sherwood)? One point in Goober’s favor is that he and his wife already have five rambunctious children while Brick and Maggie have none. In fact, gossip has it that Brick and Maggie aren’t even sleeping in the same bed! (While Maggie begs Brick to make love to her, Brick defiantly sleeps on the couch.) The other problem is that, for whatever reason, Brick harbors unending resentment towards … well, everything. Perhaps it has something to do with the mysterious death of Brick’s best friend and former teammate, Skipper…
Brick, Maggie, Goober, and the whole clan are in Mississippi to celebrate Big Daddy’s 65th birthday. Big Daddy is happy because he’s just been told that, despite a recent scare, he does not have cancer. What Big Daddy doesn’t know is that his doctor (Larry Gates) lied to him. Big Daddy does have cancer. In fact, Big Daddy only has a year to live.
Whenever I watch Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, I find it’s helpful to try to imagine what it would have been like to watch the movie in the 1950s. Imagine how audiences, at a time when married couples were still regularly portrayed as sleeping in separate beds and when men were naturally assumed to be the kings of their household, reacted to seeing a film where Elizabeth Taylor was literally reduced to begging Paul Newman to make love to her while Newman hopped around on a crutch and continually found himself getting stuck in embarrassing situations. Though it may seem tame by today’s standards, the film was undeniably daring for 1958 and watching it is like stepping into a time machine and discovering that, yes, there was a time when Elizabeth Taylor wearing a modest slip was considered to be the height of raciness.
Of course, the film itself is quite toned down from the Tennessee Williams’s play on which it was based. Williams reportedly hated the changes that were made in the screenplay. In the play, Skipper committed suicide after confessing that he had romantic feelings for Brick, feelings that Brick claims he did not reciprocate. That was glossed voter in the film, as was the story of Skipper’s unsuccessful attempt to prove his heterosexuality by having sex with Maggie. By removing any direct reference to the romantic undercurrent of Brick and Skipper’s relationship, the film also removes most of Brick’s motivation. (It’s still there in the subtext, of course, but it’s probable that the hints that Newman and Taylor provided in their performances went straight over the heads of most audience members.) In the play, Brick is tortured by self-doubt and questions about his own sexuality. In the film, he just comes across as being rather petulant.
And again, it’s fortunate that, in the film, Brick was played by Paul Newman. It doesn’t matter how bitter Brick becomes or how much he whines about not wanting to be around his family. One look at Newman’s blue eyes and you understand why Maggie is willing to put up with him. In the role of Maggie, Elizabeth Taylor gives a performance that manages to be both ferocious and delicate at the same time. Maggie knows how to play the genteel games of the upper class South but she’s definitely not going to let anyone push her around. It’s easy to see why Big Daddy prefers the company of Maggie to his own blood relations. It’s not just that Maggie’s beautiful, though the implication that Big Daddy is attracted to her is certainly present in the film. It’s also the she’s the only person around who is as strong and determined as him.
Indeed, seen today, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof‘s main strength is that it’s a masterclass in good acting. Williams’s dialogue is so stylized and his plot is so melodramatic that one bad performance would have caused the entire film to implode. Fortunately, Newman and Taylor make even the archest of lines sound totally natural while Burl Ives and Judith Anderson are both the epitome of flamboyant charisma as Big Daddy and Big Mama. It takes a lot of personality to earn a nickname like Big Daddy but Ives pulls it off.
Along with being a huge box office success, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof was nominated for best picture of 1958. However, it lost to Gigi.
Through the Shattered Lens 