A family gathering to celebrate the birthday of the patriarch Big Daddy (Burl Ives) descends into an orgy of greed and soul-searching. The play’s homosexual sub-text has been removed, so that the marital tension between Brick (Paul Newman) and Maggie (Elizabeth Taylor) is now rooted in the hero’s emotional adolescence.
Writer-director Richard Brooks saw the film as being about people ‘at odds with their public and private lives’ and he creates colourful drama from their secrets and lies. There is a superbly sustained sequence in a haunted attic as Brick and Big Daddy try to make contact, whilst predatory family members are already circling in anticipation of the spoils from Big Daddy’s (unknown to him) terminal illness. Elizabeth Taylor smoulders seductively as Maggie the Cat, and Brooks’ gleeful direction of the monstrous children seems like his revenge on two decades of MGM mawkishness.