Metacritic reviews

Burl Ives, Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor, Judith Anderson, Jack Carson and two or three more almost work and yell themselves to pieces making this drama of strife within a new-rich Southern family a ferocious and fascinating show. And what a pack of trashy people these accomplished actors perform!

Tennessee Williams’ study of a crumbling Southern patriarchy is riveting stuff. Although the word homosexuality is never uttered, this Hollywood reworking brings a certain understanding of the son’s latent “immaturity” and his wife’s childlessness. Bolstered by extraordinary performances, this tale’s a summer sizzler.

The performances are the thing in this film version of the Tennessee Williams stage triumph, led by Ives, repeating his stage role like a force of nature.

Taylor has a major credit with her portrayal of Maggie. The frustrations and desires, both as a person and a woman, the warmth and understanding she molds, the loveliness that is more than a well-turned nose – all these are part of a well-accented, perceptive interpretation.

The 1958 film Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is not a good adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s play of the same name. But as a portrayal of the depths of loneliness we create for ourselves, and an example of the power of star performance, it’s a great film.

As so often with adaptations of Williams, it frequently errs on the side of overstatement and pretension, but still remains immensely enjoyable as a piece of cod-Freudian codswallop.

In his four earlier films, Williams seemed to need a warmup of two backward steps before he could take one step forward, but at least the movement was visible and real. This time, Adapter-Director Richard Brooks has been able to put very little motion in his motion picture. His Cat is a formaldehyded tabby that sits static while layer after layer of its skin is peeled off, life after life of its nine lives unsentimentally destroyed. But in Williams, Brooks has a rare playwright who can make his static electric, and a blinkered grope toward the past as suspenseful as a headlong crash into the future.

Two of cinema's most iconic stars on top form make this worth a good look.

The material has been bowdlerized to the point of abstraction, which makes Richard Brooks's sweaty, emphatic direction look a little silly—there just isn't that much to get worked up about. But Burl Ives and Judith Anderson are highly entertaining as the nightmare parents, Big Daddy and Big Mama, and Jack Carson has one of his last good roles as Newman's competitive older brother.

The performances are sweltering...This isn’t a good thing. Yes, it’s fitting for the setting – a humid, suffocating Louisiana mansion where the family of an ailing tycoon (Burl Ives) connives to inherit his fortune – but the overall result is like watching a melodrama in a sauna. It’s just too much.