“I’m gonna live. … I’ve got a million different feelings left in me. And I’m gonna use ‘em. I’m gonna use ‘em all.” Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 1958 Say “mendacity” one more time. An old tycoon learns to love (or learns its value) while his son finally comes around and agrees to give his wife a child. This, after she lies that she’s pregnant. Eventhough everyone knows she’s lying. She’s “full of life” so it doesn’t matter. A companion to Woman Is a Woman: lovers quarrel because she wants and child and he doesn’t. A lie makes it all happen by the end. They’re both kind of miserable films, though Woman is at least fun in its capricious acting set-pieces. The problem with a drama that works itself out to be solved by a lie is that someone has to believe it for it to be dramatically satisfying. Eyes Wide Shut ends with a plan never to look under the covers again. Two people who pledge to start living with wide eyes in safe spaces. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance relies on a tall tale to bring back the characters to where they were at the beginning of the movie’s flashback structure. A family unit and a country that relies on a myth (not untrue but not true in the least) to move forward and progress. A Woman Is a Woman has the boyfriend agree to try and have a child only to cover the fact that it may not be his but another man’s whom the wife may have conceived with: this way they’ll never know. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (the movie version anyway) requires that the husband submit to a status quo he is more than uncomfortable about. His mourning isn’t just for a dead friend, but about the lies and the system of repression his Old South family creates for him. He is full of life and yearns to have people look him in the face. He wants love. His wife is a beautifully acted symbol of all that requires airs (like her sister-in-law) and forced naturalness (something Elizabeth Taylor can do magnificently and where the sister-in-law fails). Look at the way she constantly swallows her pain and brightens up her tone when calling up stairs or answering a question. When she finally gives her birthday present to her father-in-law, it’s a fabrication designed to make an old man happy. She plays the part she has to, as an outsider to the family, until it becomes true. I’m not totally sure why Paul Newman at this point finally agrees to have her child. Maybe because he knows it’s the only thing that will let him find any love with any of the people in his life. Maybe by having a child he knows he can claim his estate and start again, using his principles instead of his father’s ambitions to create a dynasty. The movie itself is an adaptation of a Tennessee Williams play that suffers in translation from stage to movie play. Not only is a lot of motivation taken from thhe Skippy subplot, the entire thing lags. Here is a scene is Room 1, then Room 2, then thunder represents the family battle waging inside the mansion, then Room 1 again and so on. Its staging and sense of composition come from an idea of a stage rather than a world the camera is free to roam around. The most interesting moment speaks more to possibilities of theatre than to why we watch film. An argument in the living room is overheard by Paul Newman and his sister-in-law steps out to fetch him, thinking he’s upstairs, and finds him outside the door, where he answered the question she rhetorically asked of him inside the living room. He then moves downstairs into the basement to visit his ailing father. On a stage, assuming that each room is a set (taking up the centre of the main deck), this kind of moment (totally outside the action) would be harder to foreground. It might result in their confrontation (a crucial one as these are the two characters that are most different from each other) being acted out far stage right or stage left. An option would be to build a kind of three-level interior on a stage and reveal it with lighting and maybe a track that vertically shifts what we see. Sort of elaborate. But it leaves open the possibility of having each character in the house exposed to the audience, having their personal moments of reaction and grief visible. These characters negating a moment of peace. Which, to me, seems way more believable. It’s one thing to say “he’s just off drowning his sorrows” but another thing to have him stuck there, ifull view, actively not part of the scene. And it would speak volumes to the idea that these are characters who do in fact have a million different feelings inside them, each wanting to come out. Then, when we see any confrontation, any relationship, it’s in the context of one particular moment happening, instead of the the only moment happening of its kind. Then, a lie is more believable, because we see how exposed they are to truth, to themselves, and how hidden they are from each other.

“I’m gonna live. … I’ve got a million different feelings left in me. And I’m gonna use ‘em. I’m gonna use ‘em all.”

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 1958

Say “mendacity” one more time.

An old tycoon learns to love (or learns its value) while his son finally comes around and agrees to give his wife a child.

This, after she lies that she’s pregnant. Eventhough everyone knows she’s lying. She’s “full of life” so it doesn’t matter.

A companion to Woman Is a Woman: lovers quarrel because she wants and child and he doesn’t. A lie makes it all happen by the end.

They’re both kind of miserable films, though Woman is at least fun in its capricious acting set-pieces.

The problem with a drama that works itself out to be solved by a lie is that someone has to believe it for it to be dramatically satisfying.

Eyes Wide Shut ends with a plan never to look under the covers again. Two people who pledge to start living with wide eyes in safe spaces. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance relies on a tall tale to bring back the characters to where they were at the beginning of the movie’s flashback structure. A family unit and a country that relies on a myth (not untrue but not true in the least) to move forward and progress. A Woman Is a Woman has the boyfriend agree to try and have a child only to cover the fact that it may not be his but another man’s whom the wife may have conceived with: this way they’ll never know.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (the movie version anyway) requires that the husband submit to a status quo he is more than uncomfortable about. His mourning isn’t just for a dead friend, but about the lies and the system of repression his Old South family creates for him. He is full of life and yearns to have people look him in the face. He wants love. His wife is a beautifully acted symbol of all that requires airs (like her sister-in-law) and forced naturalness (something Elizabeth Taylor can do magnificently and where the sister-in-law fails). Look at the way she constantly swallows her pain and brightens up her tone when calling up stairs or answering a question.

When she finally gives her birthday present to her father-in-law, it’s a fabrication designed to make an old man happy. She plays the part she has to, as an outsider to the family, until it becomes true.

I’m not totally sure why Paul Newman at this point finally agrees to have her child. Maybe because he knows it’s the only thing that will let him find any love with any of the people in his life. Maybe by having a child he knows he can claim his estate and start again, using his principles instead of his father’s ambitions to create a dynasty.

The movie itself is an adaptation of a Tennessee Williams play that suffers in translation from stage to movie play. Not only is a lot of motivation taken from thhe Skippy subplot, the entire thing lags.

Here is a scene is Room 1, then Room 2, then thunder represents the family battle waging inside the mansion, then Room 1 again and so on. Its staging and sense of composition come from an idea of a stage rather than a world the camera is free to roam around.

The most interesting moment speaks more to possibilities of theatre than to why we watch film.

An argument in the living room is overheard by Paul Newman and his sister-in-law steps out to fetch him, thinking he’s upstairs, and finds him outside the door, where he answered the question she rhetorically asked of him inside the living room. He then moves downstairs into the basement to visit his ailing father.

On a stage, assuming that each room is a set (taking up the centre of the main deck), this kind of moment (totally outside the action) would be harder to foreground. It might result in their confrontation (a crucial one as these are the two characters that are most different from each other) being acted out far stage right or stage left.

An option would be to build a kind of three-level interior on a stage and reveal it with lighting and maybe a track that vertically shifts what we see. Sort of elaborate. But it leaves open the possibility of having each character in the house exposed to the audience, having their personal moments of reaction and grief visible. These characters negating a moment of peace.

Which, to me, seems way more believable. It’s one thing to say “he’s just off drowning his sorrows” but another thing to have him stuck there, ifull view, actively not part of the scene. And it would speak volumes to the idea that these are characters who do in fact have a million different feelings inside them, each wanting to come out.

Then, when we see any confrontation, any relationship, it’s in the context of one particular moment happening, instead of the the only moment happening of its kind.

Then, a lie is more believable, because we see how exposed they are to truth, to themselves, and how hidden they are from each other.