Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)

Actually takes place indoors.

Look, I’m going to tell you the plot of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. That’s what we do here. But with just the names of the characters—Big Daddy, Maggie the Cat, and Brick—and the screenshot below, I bet you can figure it out.

A picture’s worth a thousand trivia answers.

Paul Newman plays Brick, the one-time sports star who turned to the bottle after his best friend Skipper killed himself. Elizabeth Taylor is Maggie the Cat, Brick’s sexually-frustrated wife who, suspiciously, was with Skipper the night he died. And Burl Ives rounds out the trio as “Big Daddy” Pollitt, a self-made man who loves his business more than his children.¹ These three yell at each other for most of the movie.

In classic play fashion, the yelling helps unwind the characters’ mendacity.² Brick can’t get over Skipper’s death, so Big Daddy yells at him until his alcoholism is cured.³ Big Daddy is dying of cancer, but Brick yells him into understanding that all the money in the world can’t buy eternal life. Brick’s relationship with Maggie is fixed when she falsely tells the family she’s pregnant. And everyone lives happily ever after, sort of.

Rating: 6/10. Brick = Tradition? Maggie = If I Were A Rich Man? Big Daddy = Sunrise, Sunset? Ah shoot, wrong roof play.

Cast and Crew

Even if you didn’t recognize Burl Ives from the photo above, you’d probably recognize his voice. He recorded the most famous version of “Have A Holly Jolly Christmas” and was the narrator of the 1964 stop-motion TV special “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”⁴ You’d need his name to respond to this tough 1995 Final Jeopardy question:

OSCAR-WINNING ACTORS: Poet Carl Sandburg once described him as “the mightiest ballad singer of this or any other century.”

Not sure I hear “mightiest ballad singer” in “A Little Bitty Tear” or “Funny Way of Laughin’,” but you should know that Ives won that Best Supporting Actor Oscar for The Big Country (1958).

This is the first of Paul Newman’s eight (!) Best Actor nominations, and what a performance he puts on: even on crutches and in pajamas, Newman’s melancholic brooding and piercing blue eyes scream “movie star.” Newman got his start on Broadway; it’s where he met his second wife, Joanne Woodward, to whom he was married for fifty years.⁵ Newman’s first movie role was in The Silver Chalice (1954), and he was later cast in some of the James Dean roles that Dean was too dead to do: Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956) and The Left Handed Gun (1958).

Playwright Tennessee Williams won two Pulitzers, including one for the play “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” in 1955.⁶ Three of his plays made the NAQT’s “You Gotta Know These American Plays” article: this one, “A Streetcar Named Desire,” and “The Glass Menagerie.”⁷ You should also have a working knowledge of “The Rose Tattoo,”⁸ “Sweet Bird of Youth,” “The Night of the Iguana,” and “Suddenly Last Summer,” but no rush—we’ll touch on many of these in our upcoming “What We Missed” posts.

The Trivia

“Gooper, what have all the kiddies been shot for?” “Everything but stealing chickens.” Ah, an excuse to talk about a child’s immunization schedule!

First thing’s first: you’re born, you get the Hepatitis B vaccine.⁹ Hepatitis (from the Greek for “liver” and “inflammation”) is a virus that infects the liver, and the reason for the immediate shot is because mothers can unknowingly give Hep B to their kids.

Then, after a few months, you get an alphabet soup of shots: DTaP, Hib, IPV, PCV, and RV. Don’t panic! You can just focus on the three bacterial diseases DTaP protects against.¹⁰

• Diphtheria’s most noteworthy and severe symptom is a gray-white patch on the back of the throat that can cause a barking cough and impede breathing.

• Tetanus bacteria enter the body through open wounds. Tetanus causes painful muscle spasms and is also called “lockjaw” after one of its symptoms.

• Acellular pertussis, also called whooping cough, is characterized by months of severe coughing. The “whooping” in the name is the sound made post-coughing when the person breathes in. It’s not a fun whoop.

When you’re six months old, you then score immunity to a bunch of viral diseases: measles, mumps, and rubella (all from the MMR vaccine), Hep A, chickenpox, COVID, and the flu.

• Measles (sometimes called “red” or “English” measles, as well as rubeola) is a viral disease that gives you a full-body rash and a cough. One of its indicators is Koplik’s spots, which are white spots on the inside of the mouth.

• Mumps has one distinctive symptom: a swelling of the parotids, the largest salivary glands. (For this, it’s sometimes called “parotitis.”)

• Rubella (also called “German measles”): its name comes from the Latin for “little red.” Its symptoms are similar but more mild than measles.

Here’s a fun [sic] infographic from the CDC, showing the shots kids get and when they’re supposed to get them:

No wonder babies hate the doctor.

Some of the noteworthy childhood diseases we don’t have vaccines for are scarlet fever, roseola, and croup (laryngotracheobronchitis).

Odds and Ends

Big Daddy thinks his cancer is just a spastic colon; this is another term for IBS; Maggie calls Brick a “back-aching Puritan,” which is an excuse for me to mention German sociologist Max Weber’s work “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” which argues that Puritan ethics influenced the development of capitalism…ELIZABETH TAYLOR HUSBAND COUNT: Liz and #2, Michael Wilding, divorced amicably in 1957; that year, she married producer Mike Todd¹¹, but he died in a plane crash while Liz was making Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

That is one good-looking couple.

Though Liz suffered tragedy in 1958, she’ll bounce back in 1959 by marrying Mike Todd’s best friend.

1. There’s also Gooper (Jack Carson), Brick’s older brother who no one in the family seems to like, plus Gooper’s wife Sister Woman (Madeleine Sherwood) and their brood of unpleasant kids. Big Daddy is married to, no surprise, Big Mama (Judith Anderson).

2. “Mendacity” is a sesquipedalian word for “lyin’.” “Sesquipedalian” is a sesquipedalian word for “long.”

3. In the play, Brick’s alcoholism was symptomatic of his latent homosexual desire for his dead friend Skipper. This was omitted in the film adaptation due to the Hays Code, which kind of messes up the movie.

4. Ives’ version of the song “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” gets some play, but Gene Autry’s is probably the quintessential one.

5. I emphasize this because Newman’s fidelity in that relationship is a big part of his image. When asked about it once, he responded, “why go out for a hamburger when you have steak at home?” Newman and Woodward starred together in the 1958 film The Long, Hot Summer, which was based on “The Hamlet” by William Faulkner. “The Hamlet” was the first novel in Faulkner’s “Snopes” trilogy. (And yeah, that’s the etymology of Snopes.)

6. Is two a lot of Pulitzers? Not really—lots of people have two. Eugene O’Neill, Robert Frost, and Robert Sherwood have four.

7. Tom Wingfield supports his histrionic mother Amanda and disabled sister Laura; Laura takes refuge from reality in a world of glass animals. Laura was modeled after Williams’ lobotomized sister Rose.

8. A grieving widow (in the 1955 film, Anna Magnani) falls for a truck driver (in the film, Burt Lancaster) in Louisiana.

9. Well, first the mother gets an RSV vaccine during pregnancy to protect the soon-to-be-born baby from respiratory syncytial (sin-SISH-uhl) virus.

10. For completeness:

• Hib: Haemophilus influenzae type b vaccine

• IPV: inactivated poliovirus vaccine

• PCV: pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (protecting against pneumococcal pneumonia)

• RV: rotavirus vaccine (rotavirus being one of the most common causes of diarrhea in children)

11. Mike Todd produced the film Around the World in 80 Days (1956), which won Best Picture. Actor Cantinflas, who played Passepartout in that film, was the witness at Mike and Liz’s wedding.