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.     

Nuts!

NUTS!            B               
USA  (79 mi)  2016  d:  Penny Lane              Official Site

An irreverent film with such a preposterous opening message that one immediately assumes this is a mockumentary, a completely made-up documentary profile in order to garner laughs, told with a certain flair that distinguishes it from most documentaries, yet as it moves along, the profile of the central figure remains the same.  Instead of being a con job, it’s actually a film about one of the more notorious con men in American history.  Ironically the film was seen on the same night that Republican candidate Donald Trump accepted the convention nomination for President of the United States.  At least to this viewer, the subject was one and the same, as this film documents one of the original snake oil salesmen that used his blatantly false advertising prowess to sell millions of dollars of worthless medical products over his own radio station during the height of the Depression, yet he was also one of his state’s most respected citizens, viewed as a pillar of the community.  The film documents the rise and fall of Dr. John Romulus Brinkley, an American hero that constructed a fictional biographical account of his life as he rose to fame and fortune, similar to the character McTeague in Greed  (1924), who got his start as an apprentice to a traveling dentist con artist named Dr. Painless Potter, eventually establishing a successful practice for himself, though he had no medical certificate.  That wasn’t a problem for Brinkley, who simply falsified a diploma from the infamous Eclectic Medical University in Kansas City, allowing him to open up shop in the small, still undeveloped town of Milford, Kansas (the town was subsequently destroyed, as the grounds were flooded from the construction of a nearby dam) selling various medicines off the shelves in a dusty town of less than two hundred residents.  According to the legend, a customer came into the office seeking a remedy for male impotence, with the customer claiming he was unable to have children after a decade of trying.  The customer was persistent, refusing to accept that there was no medical cure, while at the same time looked out the window to see a Billy goat having sex with another goat, wondering if he could be implanted with the goat’s sexual glands.  Intrigued at the prospect, the good doctor was willing to give it a try with such a willing patient by performing the first-of-its-kind surgery, with the patient pleased to report afterwards that his wife got pregnant and they were happily expecting their first child.  With this success story, Brinkley built an empire by successfully promoting his own goat-testicle impotence cure.  

One of the first things he did was build a radio tower in town, opening a high-powered radio station which was programmed with country music, also the first of its kind, speaking for hours each day, literally flooding the airwaves with advertisements selling his various medicinal products as home remedies for just about any ailment you could name, attracting patients from all over the globe, which helped him amass a fortune.  In doing so, he helped install electricity in town, build a post office to handle the massive amount of mail sent to him, but also sidewalks, a town library, and a new sewage system, while also opening a hospital clinic to treat his patients, eventually expanding to clinics and hospitals in several states.  In this manner he became viewed as a valuable and upstanding citizen, beloved by the people in Kansas, which protected him from federal agents looking to arrest him for obtaining a bogus medical license, as the governor of Kansas refused to extradite him since he brought so much money into the state.  As a result, he was considered untouchable, where the broad reach of his radio show kept him in business.  One of his most successful devices was issuing medical advice over the radio, where he would read listener’s medical complaints on the air and dispense recommended medicines to cure their reported ailments, opening a series of pharmacies that sold his products exclusively while also establishing a highly successful mail-order business.  While there is a certain amount of archival footage that looks more like home movies, where there is footage of Brinkley and his wife playing with their young son, but also living a luxurious life of splendor as they travel the world on ocean cruises.  Like The Great Gatsby (2013), he became known for hosting lavish parties, where among his clientele were William Jennings Bryant and Rudolph Valentino with a product that predates Viagra, becoming something of a state celebrity.  But as there is insufficient material to make a movie, the director makes a clever choice, using animated sequences to fill in the narrative, with different animators drawing different sequences, where the change of pace is highly appealing, using a mix of archival footage with animated reenactments, interviews with historians, and a hilariously offbeat, and completely unreliable narrator (Gene Tognacci).  The lead-up to his success is strikingly original, including a sequence mocking the famous goat gland cure in a Buster Keaton short, COPS (1922), where this constant shift in stylistic point of view is immensely entertaining, all told with an upbeat tone of affirmation and optimism, where Brinkley is seen as an innovator, where you almost wonder why we never heard of this guy before, as his influence and reach is astounding, making him the television evangelist of the radio era.  

But the euphoric mood quickly shifts when the American Medical Association (AMA) starts targeting him, specifically Morris Fishbein, a physician who became editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, a man who built his reputation on exposing medical frauds, stripping Brinkley of his license to practice medicine in Kansas, calling him a charlatan and a quack in their medical journals.  Undeterred, Brinkley moved to the state of Texas, building another radio tower, this one on the other side of the border in Mexico, creating a million-watt signal that was so strong it could still be heard in Kansas, broadcasting to the entire United States, along with 16 other countries, easily the most powerful radio channel anywhere in the world at that time, also building a new hospital where he and his wife lived on the upper floor.  Brinkley also sued Fishbein and the AMA for slander, claiming he had dozens of patients who were happy to testify on his behalf as they were completely satisfied with the results of his medical treatment.  However the judge ruled their testimony out of order, as they were not considered legitimate medical experts.  Nonetheless, Brinkley had a dream team of legal advisors outnumbering the AMA that only had a single lawyer.  But that lawyer was extremely effective at cross-examining Brinkley on the witness stand, challenging each and every supposed medical advancement as little more that fakery and fraud, skillfully exposing the lack of medical benefits from using his products, where the purported medicine was often little more than water and colored dye, yet he charged an outlandish fee of $100 per bottle.  It became clear that Brinkley was sociopathically delusional about his own abilities, performing surgeries that had no medical effect whatsoever on one’s well-being, offering placebos for actual medicine, while amassing a fortune for offering little more than a false promise.  It’s a devastating takedown, with Brinkley unwittingly cooperating in bringing about his own downfall, reluctantly acknowledging earning $1.2 million dollars for himself in just one year during the heart of the Depression.  Had he been a real doctor, he would have shared his success stories with the world of science, which routinely acknowledges breakthroughs in medical advancements, but there was nothing to share, as he was never an actual doctor to begin with, but did fool the public with ingenious advertisement campaigns that were little more than personal get rich quick schemes.  He built for himself a mountain of publicity, which could then be used as evidence against him.  What followed afterwards was a series of lawsuits for malpractice and fraud, eventually exposing Brinkley as a quack, exactly as he had been described in the medical journals.  It’s a sad end to what amounts to a mythical rags to riches American Dream story, ending in the tragic fall when Icarus flies too close to the sun.  Ironically, that abandoned radio tower in Mexico became the site of disc jockey Wolfman Jack’s infamous introduction of rock ‘n’ roll music on the radio, which in the 50’s and 60’s was still the most powerful signal in North America.