Cat On a Hot Tin Roof

CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF                             A                    

USA  (108 mi)  1958  d: Richard Brooks

How does one drowning man help another drowning man?          —Brick (Paul Newman)

A hugely powerful work, arguably Tennessee Williams’ best play, and his personal favorite, but the playwright disowned the film version, claiming it censored some of the original power by deleting the homosexual references in the lead character.  Paul Newman, the star, also noted his disappointment with the screen adaptation, which also revises the final act.  However, even with the author’s reservations, this is a stunning film, especially memorable by the iconic performances, where each meticulously created character is forever etched in our memories.  Burl Ives as Big Daddy, the wealthy owner of 28,000 acres of the most fertile land in Mississippi, is unforgettable as the gruff speaking, big-bellied patriarch who is led to believe he has a second chance at life, that he has a clean bill of health instead of the terminal cancer he feared.  This is spectacular news on his 65th birthday, where his family has gathered at his huge plantation to celebrate.  Judith Anderson is the matriarch Big Momma, continually shamed into second class status by the iron clad rule of her overbearing husband.  Elizabeth Taylor has never looked more glamorous than as Maggie the Cat, the beautiful wife of Brick (Paul Newman), the favored son and heir to the throne, a man drowning in his own sorrows, self-pity, and plenty of liquor, disgusted at the turn of his life and disgusted with Maggie, refusing to allow her anywhere near him, despite her attempts to entice him away from the bottle.  Equally memorable are the “no-necked monsters,” the endlessly annoying, spoiled, ill-bred children of Jack Carson as Goober, the dutiful and obedient son, and Madeleine Sherwood as his perpetually pregnant wife Mae, otherwise known as Sister Woman, one of the more contemptible characters to ever hit the screen, whose proficiency at backstabbing is second to none. 

Offscreen, Elizabeth Taylor was emotionally distraught and near paralyzed from the death of her husband, Michael Todd, who died in a plane accident shortly after the birth of their child, an event that held up shooting for several weeks.  Todd actually negotiated the part for his wife with MGM, where immersing herself in the role of Maggie the Cat is reported to have saved her career, receiving the second of 4 Academy Award nominations for Best Actress in four consecutive years, and if truth be told, it is a career-defining performance worthy of a star, one that defines her as an actress, typified by her sexual allure, smoldering passion, intelligence, combativeness, and simmering restraint.  Wearing a white slip or a white cocktail dress, she exudes glamour and elegant sensuality either way, offering an extraordinary sense of urgency and even desperation about life while her husband is steeped in impotency and despair (the gay subtext makes much more sense than what is implied here).  Newman, who hops around on a single crutch after breaking his ankle, goes through several bottles of whisky in one day, enough to knock most men off their feet, but barely seems phased by it as he’s plenty coherent when he needs to be, but has no interest in sharing in the family party festivities, especially the ridiculously aggravating moments from the trained-like-monkeys children.  But that doesn’t stop the party from coming to him, where eventually he and his father confront each other’s personal disgust with all the “lies and mendacity” that consume their lives.  Their knock-down, drag-out, man to man talk is one for the ages, and comprises the central themes of the film.  It is blisteringly intense and goes through several lengthy phases, exploring the dysfunctional family component each has learned to despise. 

Both father and son go through an achingly personal transformation confronting the skeletons in their closet, but Ives’s performance is off the charts, especially after he learns the truth that he’s really dying of cancer.  His Lear-like patriarchal prominence dwarfs the rest of the cast, even Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman at the peak of their beauty and power, as the death looming over his head is all that matters, everything else is secondary.  As Goober and his Iago-like wife fight for their piece of the inheritance, Brick only grows less and less interested, infuriated as much with himself as anything else, but also overwhelmed by the impending death of his father.  In a storm sequence, Big Daddy fades away into the basement where he’s alone with his Xanadu of life’s collectibles, all stockpiled, filling every inch of space, covered in cobwebs.  The man may as well be alone with his dreams as he watches them all disappear before his eyes.  When Brick joins him, after an initial disagreeable outburst of suppressed anger, the pace of the film slows, becoming quietly reflective, and as they seem to reconcile their differences, Ives reflects on his own life with a newfound clarity.  It’s the scene of the film, perhaps unsurpassed in the entire Williams’ repertoire, but ironically also a revision from the original play, yet beautifully written by Richard Brooks and James Poe and perfectly delivered, simply an unforgettable moment, where the background music of a lone harmonium can be heard underscoring the hauntingly dramatic poignancy.  Ives won a Best Supporting Actor that same year for his performance in William Wyler’s THE BIG COUNTRY (1958), where he’s the patriarch of another dysfunctional western family, but his spellbinding performance here is nothing short of brilliant, easily the greatest performance in his lifetime.  Once more, just like on her last film Raintree County (1957), leave it to Elizabeth Taylor to bring down the curtain in dramatic style.     

Network

NETWORK           A-                   

USA  (121 mi)  1976  d:  Sidney Lumet

We’ll wipe that fucking Disney right off the air.                 
—Max Schumaker (William Holden)                    

That Mao Tse-Tung Hour is turning into one big pain in the ass.  
—Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway)

“I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!!”

—Howard Beale (Peter Finch)

You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.

—Arthur Jensen, corporate owner of the Network (Ned Beatty)

Paddy Chayefsky is the story of this movie, as this film lives and breathes every word he’s written in what is arguably one of the greatest screenplays in movie history (See Tim Dirks’ web evaluation here:  http://www.filmsite.org/101greatestscreenplays4.html), although Billy Wilder was no slouch.  Always smart and cleverly inventive, this is a cynically demented yet highly entertaining bleak apocalyptic vision that reveals how the television industry is destroying the human race.  This scathingly dark satire on the far-reaching global effects of television is brilliantly prophetic, as true today as it was when it was written, perhaps even more so because so much of what seemed like hare-brained economic hypotheses at the time are more in evidence today.  In short, this is a film about wacko sidewalk preachers who for generations have stood on soapboxes in the rain and cold, perhaps with a cheap microphone, passing out pamphlets, trying to scream the apocalyptic truths from the mountaintops, usually assured that no one would listen, until someone invented the perfect platform along with a voicebox called television.  Somehow, while the whole world watches, what passes for the truth in the world is what happens to be seen on TV, historic moments like the assassination and funeral service of President Kennedy, the subsequent murder of his assassin Lee Harvey Oswald captured on live TV, brutally violent photographic accounts bringing the war in Vietnam home to people’s living rooms along with the mounting demonstrations and protests against the war, the street clashes at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago which turned into a police riot, effectively ruining any Democrats chance of winning the Presidency, or live feeds of the first man on the moon, which many today still believe was concocted in a back room television studio somewhere.  This was the TV generation raised to see and hear the daily reports of history unravel on the 5 o’clock news as reported by the network confidant Walter Cronkite, who was as wise and likeable as a friendly grandfather sharing the world’s pain with each passing day, perhaps making it a little easier to bear.  This is the unseen and untold backdrop to NETWORK, which is simply one’s familiarity with television. 

The cast of the film is impeccable, all with worthy resumé’s of note, with 3 actors winning Academy Awards that year, a distinction it shares with only one other film A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), with a storyline that features a Billy Wilder-like SUNSET BLVD. (1950) narrator, perhaps in tribute.  The focus is on aging news anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch), a fellow of Edward R. Murrow in the glory days of television, but now a man whose ratings have fallen leaving the network no choice but to fire him.  Going out in style, he uses his last network appearance to announce his suicide on the air, suggesting that would jettison the ratings before railing against the hypocrisy in the world, like any good soapbox preacher, building up a healthy sense of righteous indignation on the air before signing off.  Behind the scenes, the television personnel are quick to pull the plug with that old standard cop out:  “Please stand by, as we are experiencing technical difficulties.”  William Holden as Max Schumacher is Beale’s best friend and the head of the News Division, who keeps Beale on the air for as long as possible, as every element of his crying anguish rings with truth, perhaps thinking it’s about time some of the network heads heard it head on.  However, in typical corporate fashion, heads will have to roll for this disastrous display of televising live an unconscionable moment.  Enter Faye Dunaway as Diana Christensen, a corporate climber with a near delirious addiction to good ratings, the life blood of the television industry, a behind-the-scenes Lady Macbeth wringing her hands with gleeful delight as someone gladly willing to step on her own grandmother in the pursuit of her own success.   Dunaway truly steals the movie with her manic joy at the chance to receive astounding ratings by broadcasting the mad ramblings of a lunatic on the air prophesizing his own gloom and doom, now himself the lead story on all the other networks and a front page news item, building a following of adoring fans who find every word he says filled with the unpredictable thrill of live television, staying tuned, wondering what craziness he’ll do next.   Diana’s mad hopes are realized as Beale becomes an overnight sensation, lighting up the airwaves with his mad rant “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this any more!” urging viewers to yell out their windows to spew their pent-up rage, becoming a modern day Messiah.   

Once more, Lumet has created a film with his pulse on the nation’s woes, like his previous work Dog Day Afternoon (1975), where one character carries upon his back the public outrage over unending racial strife, poverty, financial woes, urban blight, a crumbling government, a President resigning in disgrace, which subsequent President Gerald Ford just sweeps under the rug as if it never happened.  Like Al Pacino’s Sonny, Howard Beale bears the weight of the world’s ills on his shoulders.  His outrage and anger are a metaphor for the growing helplessness of those who see the world veering out of control, where even the right to vote can be ignored by as many as half the nation’s discouraged eligible voters.  But Beale is only part of the story, as this film does an excellent job stripping the veneer behind corporate excess, where behind the curtain in closed door suites are well financed billionaires pulling the levers of control not only of their giant tax-evading corporations, but also the nation’s newspapers, radio broadcasts and television airwaves, exerting a major political influence on their editorial content, shaping the view of the audience by manipulating them as they see fit.  In fact, this film itself is much like a giant full-length editorial, filled with plenty of screaming people who rant and rave over the deception of the truth through a neverending charade of lies and deceit.  The dialogue in this film is so rich with an excoriating venom of disgust over the outrageous hypocrisy of human deviousness, filled with a neverending stream of monologues that are not just devastating, but a screenplay that is overwhelming ambitious in scope, using a take no prisoners attitude while at the same time being presciently accurate, seeing the shape of the future before it happens.  Thirty or forty years later, the world very much resembles this demented vision of poorly vented outrage with steadily weakened, feeble-minded human beings who have lost all sense of power and individualism in the world except the right to vent their anger in a futile wrath of unending bitterness and disgust.  Whether this dark and scathing work is a cinema masterpiece is another story and still open to question, where the ALPHAVILLE (1965) like love story in the middle feels strangely out of place and has an eerily developing theatrical science fiction feel to it.  Despite being a work of fiction, this movie still plays like a documentary exposé filled with the bitter truths of living in today’s everchanging world.