I just saw this movie last week, from Netflix, and I was amazed. I don’t always like movies of that era, because of the hammy acting, but I loved this one. The family dynamic was superbly entertaining and interesting and I liked the contrast between the in-your-face attitude of Gooper and Mae and much more subtle feelings of Brick & Maggie.
I particularly liked the subtle things - I mean, I knew by the end that Gooper didn’t exactly like his wife, either, but he had done exactly what his father wanted and married a woman more or less like his mother.
I knew that while Big Mama was annoying and loud and obnoxious she really really loved Big Daddy and had done everything to make him happy - she just never understood him, not a whit.
I knew that Big Daddy was forever running away from the poverty-stricken days of his youth. I could almost feel it coming off him in waves - “no one will ever be able to look at me and see where I came from.”
Brick showed clear elements of his father even though he didn’t want to admit it. It’s also clear that he wants his father’s love but not in the form of money - money doesn’t do anything for him. He only wants the money if it comes with his father’s love.
But the best role of all was of course Maggie. First of all, Elizabeth Taylor was hot! For someone who grew up in the 80s and 90s and only rememberes Taylor as an old, if glamorous woman, who married a lot, it was amazing to see her - curvaceous, with those brilliant blue eyes, in those tight, form-fitting dresses, looking so eternally graceful and beautiful.
And Maggie’s role was also interesting. Stuck in a potentially loveless marriage, married to a man who might or might not be gay, but who had loved her, once upon a time, having almost made a mistake, but having backed down from it at the last possible moment, and still being blamed for it, and being so deathly afraid of being poor - I hung onto her every word.
I have read a fair amount of Tennessee Williams’ stuff. This is one of the plays I never read, though I may have to now.
Great movie. And I agree about Liz Taylor. She was so smoking hot it was clear that something was “wrong” with Brick because he didn’t want her. It’s been a while but I didn’t get that Brick was gay. I thought he was just refusing to do what was expected of him.
“What’s that smell in this room? Didn’t you notice it, Brick? Didn’t you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room?”
I’ve always thought that Madeleine Sherwood was a really good actress–not “attractive”, but not bad-looking, either. But in this movie, I found her [character] to be incredibly repulsive, in looks and personality. I did like the part about the “no-neck” children.
I caught the homosexuality subtext, though it was subtly done. Just after several comments in the heat of the discussion between Maggie and Brick, I was like…“Are they talking about him and Skipper being gay? But then…they didn’t talk about such things, did they?”
That was another thing. The frank admissions in that movie! The fact that everyone ‘knew’ Brick and Maggie weren’t sleeping together, as an example.
My understanding was that the original play made it clear that Brick was gay, but it had to be changed for the film version (Hays Office would not allow it).
Anaa, If you want to see another enjoyable movie with a gorgeous young Elizabeth Taylor, watch “A Place in the Sun” with Montgomery Clift - based on the novel “An American Tragedy”, which is based on a true story.
The play is less subtle about it- Big Daddy pretty much asks him flat-out. The surprising part is that he also let’s Brick know that if he’s gay, Big Daddy’s pretty cool with it- the men who raised him after his father died and from whom he inherited that mansion were gay and slept together in Brick and Maggie’s bedroom- but Brick’s not ready to deal. The great scene where Big Daddy recalls his days with his dad (“the old tramp”) is not in the play, which is a disappointment.
The play was recently done on Broadway with an all black cast: James Earl Jones as Big Daddy, Phylicia Rashad as Big Mama, Terrence Howard as Brick, and Anika Noni Rose as Maggie. I’d love to have seen it- I’m not that familiar with Anika Noni Rose but the other three are all great actors; no idea if they worked the race into the dialogue.
I didn’t pick up on the gay subtext at all. I thought the reason Brick didn’t sleep with Maggie was because he was impotent. Haven’t seen or read the play.
As the IMDB triviasection notes, Taylor’s husband Mike Todd was killed in a plane crash just as filming began. She went ahead with the filming, though cast members noticed she wasn’t eating; they conspired to make extra takes necessary in scenes where Taylor had to eat, just so she’d get something into her.
This is a great movie, and Liz Taylor is just radiantly gorgeous . . . though in general I much prefer Tennessee Williams on the stage. I think his works demand a kind of intimacy that can only come across live. Plus of course the obligatory gay subtext that’s all but destroyed in the films.