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"Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" Not so Hot
by Wyatt Newman
I'm unable to point fingers at persons that took me to see the
1958 film sensation, "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." I know I
went with two guys, classmates of course, and it had to have been
the late sophomore or early junior year. I suspect it was two guys I
ran around with in those underclass years, who went on to Red and
Black pastures at North Central, Jack Rojan and Bill McKinney, chums
from Logan days, but the inevitable drifting apart took place, as
often happens as one adjusts to the changes from grade school to
high school.
I recently viewed a video of that movie. Elizabeth Taylor was
stunningly beautiful. Paul Newman was his usual studly male persona.
It was in glorious technicolor. Still, seeing the movie close to
half a century later leaves me as bored as watching a soap opera,
and that's what the film is--a 2 hour soap opera.
It has the usual characteristics of a soap--no one is in a good
mood; lots of fighting and arguing; lots of sexual under and
overtones; lots of cleavage from Liz, she with the flashing violet
eyes as Maggie, in dual with her unloving husband, Brick, and Paul
with his piercing blue eyes. And most Paul Newman movies, he has a
string of adult beverages from bottle to glass to mouth, never
ending. Did lots of drinking make him more manly?
I seem to remember that my seatmates at the Post, as I recall, were
enthralled, probably with Liz parading around in either a plunging
neckline slip or dress...both white-- a nice contrast with her
midnight black hair. I well recall having that same feeling with
"Cat" as I did with all movies with adult themes:
"When is this ever going to end?" When I tried to make a
crack about something in the movie to the guy next to me, I was
properly shushed.
My time had not arrived for such movies, me still being stuck in
WWII, Westerns and science fiction. Oh, there was lots of combat in
"Cat," but good war movies, by a standard my brother and I
had, never had dames, and yelling adults just aren't soldiers.
Verbal combat doesn't count. "Cat" took place in
Mississippi, which ain't Western. No monsters or nuclear-affected
bugs to frighten viewers.
The movie was heavily promoted in newspaper ads and theater posters,
which showed Liz in her nightgown, legs and more displayed, in a
half-reclining position on a bed. Hot stuff. The promotional picture
was one undoubtedly designed to attract male viewers. So why was the
movie so boring to a kid of 16? I answered that: it wasn't about
WWII, wasn't located in the West and had no nuclear re-arranged
creatures or beings from beyond our stratosphere.
Liz looks better in the video from a 21st Century perspective.
- Wyatt
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