Cat on a Hot Tin Roof · reception & legacy

1958 · Richard Brooks

How Cat on a Hot Tin Roof has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

A smash in 1958 — MGM's biggest hit of the year, six Oscar nominations — but Tennessee Williams famously hated it for censoring the play's gay subtext; today it's seen as both a compromised adaptation and an irresistible star vehicle, with the Newman–Taylor pairing doing what the script can't say.

What's debated

The eternal debate: does the Production Code's scrubbing of Brick's sexuality gut the film, or do the performances smuggle the subtext back in anyway?

Its footprint

Elizabeth Taylor in the white slip is one of the defining images of 1950s Hollywood, and 'mendacity' became the film's signature word — Burl Ives' Big Daddy bellowing it is endlessly quoted and parodied.

Where it stands

A fixture of the classic-Hollywood canon and a gateway melodrama — the film people watch for Newman and Taylor at peak wattage, even those who insist the play is better.

★ Did you know? Elizabeth Taylor's husband, producer Mike Todd, was killed in a plane crash mid-production in March 1958 — Taylor, ill, had stayed home instead of flying with him, and returned to finish the film weeks later while in mourning; Tennessee Williams disliked the sanitized adaptation and reportedly discouraged people from seeing it.