Films

Tennessee Williams' shattering dissection of the hate, spite, greed and guilt that seethe through a lushly appointed Southern mansion has been translated to the screen with whiplash impact in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, powerfully and inventively directed by Richard Brooks. Though adaptors Brooks and James Poe have gotten out into the sunlight a couple of times, they've confined most of the raw emotional outbursts of husbands, wives and sisters-in-law to various rooms in the manse, the roof of which threatens to blow off periodically from all the bitterly drawled and shouted recriminations bouncing off the walls. The basic plot's sort of similar to the play: On hand to celebrate the 65th birthday of Big Daddy (Burl Ivies), who has just flunked a cancer test but doesn't know it, are his two sons and their wives, plus assorted neighbors. Son Brick (Paul Newman), a brooding former football star kept indoors by a busted ankle he got trying to do the high hurdles with too much alcohol ballast, is uninterested in his pretty wife, Maggie (Elizabeth Taylor), who wears her desperate love for Brick like a lavaliere. Their scraps, stemming mainly from her vain efforts to wean him from the bottle, are chortled at by Brick's oafish brother Gooper (Jack Carson) and Gooper's fruitful wife Mae (Madeleine Sherwood), both avid for the old man's wad. They think their herd of kids gives them the odds, but Big Daddy likes Brick best and he still gets rutty when he sees Maggie. Perplexed by Brick's behavior, Big Daddy hounds him for an explanation. Brick surlily refuses to account for his rebuffing of Maggie till Big Daddy denies him his redeye. The explanation Brick gives in the movie is not the same one he gave in the play, of course, since references to homosexuality, however covert, are generally eschewed in American pictures: hence, at this point, the whiplash impact becomes a dull thud, the previous mounting expectation is revealed as a fraud, and you begin to think Brick's outraged cries against "Mendacity!" were meant to apply to the script.

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If you can stomach one more package of sinking-ship vignettes, chances are you'll eat up the British A Night to Remember (from Walter Lord's same-name book about the doomed Titanic). It's well done, full of drama, visually big and bustling, with a tight screenplay by Eric Ambler and controlled, firm, understated direction by Roy Baker. Harrowing, heart-catching, handsome. Cast? Of thousands. We lost count.

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Terence Rattigan is not a great playwright, but he is a clever concocter of effective theatrical gimmicks. One of his favorite tricks is to write an evening of two one-act plays in which a single star can portray two sharply contrasting characters: this sort of hokum, in the hands of an accomplished histrion, is entertaining to watch and to play. Maurice Evans had a field day on Broadway a few years back playing a Milquetoastish schoolteacher and a flamboyant Shakespearean actor in the same evening in Ratting's The Browning Version and Harlequinade, respectively. More recently, Eric Portman played a howlingly phony army major and a brooding, introspective, leftist journalist to Margaret Leighton's plain jane/glamorous model in the same Mr. R's Separate Tables. This last tour de force is now a film, but – wouldn't you know it? – the double-role device has been dumped, and with it, a large chunk of the original fun. The Portman parts have been divvied up between David Nive and Burt Lancaster, the Leighton roles assigned to Rita Hayworth and Deborah Kerr. These charming people earn their money, but deprived of its gimmick, Tables as to stand on its own legs, and ooh are they ever rickety.

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As the personal pronoun half of Me and the Colonel, Danny Kaye draws an intelligently thought-out portrait of Samuel Jacobowsky, an itinerant Jew constantly kept on the move by the advances of the German army across the European continent during the dark third and fourth decades of the present century. That the solemnly clad, gentle-spoken Jacobowsky has eluded a fate such as Dachau comes as no great surprise as the character begins to grow and develop. Jacobowsky is a thinking man. Jacobowsky is a clever man. Jacobowsky is a resourceful man who, although he doesn't exactly fling himself into the teeth of adversity, nevertheless can face most perils and turn situations to his advantage – always gently and without force. A shrug of the shoulders, a sudden light sparkling in the eye...as the problems come and go, it's hard to finger the exact point where Danny Kaye and Jacobowsky merge into a common identity. As the flick opens, Panzer divisions are closing in on Paris, Jacobowsky's temporary home, and he has to get out. Means of transportation? Easily solved: Jacobowsky commanders a vintage Rolls-Royce from the deserted Rothschild estate. Means of moving the heisted heap? The professional refugee doesn't drive, but an acquaintance, a militantly anti-Semitic Polish colonel (blusteringly played by Curt Jurgens) does. The colonel, too, must escape to fulfill a rendezvous with an English sub which will carry him and the secret papers he holds to the Polish government in exile. But the stiff-necked, aristocratic Pole has no desire to enter into a plasy-walsy journey with a Jew. Patriotism finally wins out over prejudice, however, and the two set out on their perilous tour accompanied by the colonel's lackey (a droll conception by Akim Tamiroff) and his mistress (Nicole Maurey). The journey encompasses a wide variety of situations – romantic, farcical, melodramatic – and each of these has been skillfully contrived (chiefly by S. N. Behrman from the play he adapted from the original work by Franz Werfel), directed (by Peter Glenville) and acted by a dandy cast led by this new improved Kaye, who gives the show its gleam with just the right doses of schmaltz, intelligence and heart wherever they're called for.

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Houseboat wisely mixes the urbanity of Cary Grant and the warmth of Sophia Loren in a kind of Satevepost story about baby-sitting and such that, though treacly, is surprisingly gay. Perennially youthful, unflaggingly charming Grant can do little wrong when he's in his element, and he's in it up to his stylishlygray sideburns in this one. What the hell, why fight it? Even Norman Rockwell can be fun once in a while.