Adaptation of one of the most famous theatrical dramas by Tennessee Williams, winner of the Pulilitzer Prize in 1955. Starring Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor, it received 6 Oscar nominations.
This exciting film with a brilliant staging of its protagonists transports us to the bosom of a family of rich landowners from the southern United States, the Pollits, who get together to celebrate the birthday of the family patriarch, Big Daddy played by (Burl Ives ). The family is made up of a young married couple, Brick (Paul Newman) and Margaret (Elizabeth Taylor); Brick's older brother Gooper, his wife Mae and their five young children and the owners of the mansion, Big Daddy and his wife, who they call Big Momma (Judith Anderson).
The play takes place in the Pollit mansion, where each character enters the scene with their respective emotional wounds of youth, those of the protagonist Rick the deepest, that character lacking love and affection from his father, for whom the only way to show his love is by providing his children with all the wealth that he did not have when he was a child, who did not lack love because he did have a loving father whom he always accompanied in his wandering life as a vagabond and who despite hardships and circumstances loved deeply.
Rick tries to find that figure to admire and venerate in another person, a friend whom he pretends to idealize, but when that role myth falls apart, he feels lost. His wife Magi, deeply and passionately in love, desperately tries to hold on to him despite Rick's feigned slights. Magi with a childhood full of scarcity and poverty is going to fight to stay and be close to Rick.
"You know how I feel? Like a cat on a hot tin roof"
"Cats jump off rooftops and don't get damage. Go ahead. Jump» "Jump to where?" "Find yourself a lover" "I don't deserve this. I have no eyes for any other man. Even when I close them I see only you»
When that great character enters the scene, magnificently played by Burl Ives "Big Dady", it is the moment in which all the emotional wounds of the family begin to surface, those of the older brother who has fulfilled all the wishes of his father, in looking for the love and predilection that his father feels for his little brother Rick, which has made him a vile, greedy and mean character. He and his wife will try in a petty way to curry favor with Big Dady. The mother who senses her husband's rudeness and pretends not to notice when she silently suffers his slights.
Surely we all know a case with which to illustrate this type of wounds produced in our childhood due to lack of recognition and affection and that turn their protagonists into helpless characters full of hatred and bitterness.
The announcement of Big Dady's imminent death will force the father to have to exercise his role as such and cure that deep emptiness that Rick feels due to the lack of someone to lean on, hence the metaphor that begins the film, Rick running in a baseball stadium at night and drunk trying to jump some fences breaks his leg, so throughout the film he will need to rely on crutches. Father and son will come face to face emotionally with the great universal truths, life, death, love, passion, wealth, poverty, pettiness, and understanding them will reconcile them.
