bricked up in boyhood
by Douglas Messerli
His beautiful cat-like wife, Maggie (Elizabeth
Taylor), on the other hand, is equally perverse in her determinedness to remain
with him, despite his complete dismissal of her constant sexual readiness, to
bear out the hot stare of the sun on the tin roof of the Mississippi mansion in
which Brick and she, along with Brick’s brother, Gooper (Jack Carson),
sister-in-law Mae (Madeleine Sherwood) and their four children have gathered to
celebrate, purportedly, the 65th birthday of Big Daddy. Some of the
best comic lines, in fact, are given to Maggie, who impatiently withstands the
assaults of Gooper and Mae’s “no neck monsters,” who, through Mae’s careful
plotting, spend the entire film insensitively marching, trumpeting, singing,
dancing, waving, and shouting their way through the abyss of these touchy
adults. Despite his declared pleasure in the fecundity of the female species, it
is clear that Big Daddy cannot bear their presence—nor, for that matter, the
presence of his forebearing, ever cheerful wife, Big Mamma (the wonderful
Judith Anderson). No matter how much one loves children, these are clearly
dreadful examples of breeding combined with the machinations of their mother to
keep them constantly on view with the hope of dramatizing that fecundity (she
is pregnant with yet another) to Gooper’s parents as opposed to the barrenness
and lovelessness of Brick and Maggie’s marriage.
Gooper and Mae’s outrageous maneuvers to
inherit Big Daddy’s millions and land is often hilarious, as they, piece by
piece, lay out the evidence for Brick’s incompetence and Gooper’s patient
facility—he’s a lawyer who has helped with Big Daddy’s affairs as the old man
has grown ill. Armed with stacks of legal documentation and wills, hiding
around corners to overhear incriminating evidence, Gooper and Mae are like some
comic spies right out of a story located in the Balkans. Somewhat like her
children, Mae whines and pleads, cattily attacks and smugly stands her ground
in her attempts to make their claim for Big Daddy’s bucks.
Strangely enough, in this family of liars,
Big Daddy is determined to get to the truth. He and Brick share, so they
insist, a hatred of mendacity! And through an interlocution of Brick, the old
man is determined to get to the truth of why his handsome son (even Maggie
muses that as he gets more and more alcoholic his looks improve) has become an drunk
who refuses to embrace is willing wife. As Ives, playing Big Daddy, huffs and
puffs his way through the house, shouting out his hatred of mendacity, however,
the film turns strangely self-referential, creating an odd feeling among the
those might have witnessed the Williams play on which this perverse film was
based.
The long drawn-out series of admissions
Big Daddy elicits from his son are a mish-mash of excuses and explanations that
simply don’t add up. Seems—according to writers Richard Brooks and James Poe,
helped along by the merriment of the boys and girls at the Hays Office—that the
two boyhood friends, Brick and Skipper had a kind of idealized relationship,
wherein Brick depended upon the seemingly invulnerable grace of Skipper and
Skipper depended upon the skills of Brick, a friendship transgressed upon by
Maggie who could no longer endure their locker room camaraderie. Sick for one
game, Brick is hospitalized, and Skipper is forced to play the game without
him. According to Maggie’s account, without Brick he grew cowardly, unable to
complete plays, fumbling throughout. The team significantly lost, and Skipper’s
confidence in his own abilities was forever compromised. Deeply depressed,
Skipper needed someone to rely on, inviting Maggie into his room. To Brick’s
way of thinking, her entry was an outright seduction, a way to ruin his relationship
with Skipper “by any means necessary.” But Maggie claims that Skipper was
equally a partner in the proposed encounter; it was she who, at the last
moment, got cold feet, afraid that instead of winning Brick that she might lose
him in the act. She ran, leaving Skipper to fend for himself. Completely at
odds, with no one to help him, Skipper called Brick in his hospital room,
explaining the depths of his fear, his sense of emptiness. Angry, Brick hung
up, refusing to answer the several rings of the phone, the pleas, symbolically,
of a desperate Skipper, who later that evening committed suicide.
So there! That explains it: Brick’s
refusal to have anything more to do with his wife, his alcoholism—a product of
his guilt for turning his back on his life-long friend. Huh?
Inattentive readers might be forgiven if
they imagine they have missed something. Even reading in—as I’m prone to
do—upon this muddied narrative, it’s hard to glean the “truth.” Of course, I’ve
read the play, but even if I hadn’t I’d have to imagine that something was not
being said, that the relationship between Brick and Skipper was not just an
idealized boyhood friendship out of which Brick had never been able to emerge!
No! There was something else going on in that locker room of which Maggie the
cat got a good whiff. It’s that age-old love—at least in 1955, the date of the
stage premiere—without a name. When Skipper, having batted out with Maggie,
called Brick to name it, the boy just got scarred, that’s all, scarred to find
out what he probably knew all along, that he and Skipper had a queer love
deeper than his and Maggie’s could ever become.
“This room smells of mendacity,” shouts
Big Daddy in Richard Brook’s 1958 film, as he comes up from his basement tryst
with Brick, ready to face what he now realizes are his last hours. He has
squared off with the spectre, is ready to wander his estate with his wife to
take in the last pleasures of the world he has created. But the film—given the
perversities of the Hays Office and filmmakers of 1958—must reel off just
a few more lies: Maggie announcing that she has a life within her (both Big
Daddy and Big Momma are perfectly willing to agree that there is life within her, whether it be a
metaphor or a real foetus); but poor Newman has to almost choke on his last lines:
“No more lies in this house,” he declares embracing his “unembraceable love,” fiddling with her to fix up her fib.
Los Angeles,
March 20, 2012
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