7. CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF (1958)
Newman's first on-screen brush with Tennessee Williams. (Four years later, he'd star in a hysterical version of Sweet Bird of Youth, and in 1987 he directed Joanne Woodward in a movie of The Glass Menagerie.) It suffers from the requirement that the play be bowdlerized for Hollywood: unless you know the original's big revelation about the exact nature of the relationship between Newman's Brick and his faithful football buddy Skip, you could run this movie backwards and forwards and still end up a little hazy on just what it is that's got the rich boy with the hot wife so pouty. But it gives Newman the chance to show off his Actors Studio chops and make with the heavy Broadway dramatics, especially in the famous showdown about "mendacity" with the doomed, cantankerous father figure, Big Daddy (Burl Ives, looking like a redneck cave troll). And seeing the Adonis-like Newman demonstrate his manly self-control by refusing the increasingly desperate advances of an in-her-prime Elizabeth Taylor must have inspired a compelling mixture of bewilderment and admiration in theaters from coast to coast.
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