A quote for any occasion
Maggie mournfully remarks on Brick’s inaccessibility, Act I. What is the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof ? — I wish I knew . . . Just staying on it, I guess, as long as she can .
The phrase like a cat on hot bricks and its American-English equivalent like a cat on a hot tin roof mean very agitated or anxious. To go like a cat upon a hot bake stone. (The word bakestone, also spelt backstone, denotes a flat stone or slate on which cakes are baked in the oven.)
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof The patriarch, Big Daddy , is about to celebrate his 65th birthday.
She would stab herself in the heart if she knew he would never sleep with her again. Maggie is determined to win, however. “What is the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof ?” she asks. “Just staying on it, I guess, as long as she can…”
In the final scene, the ignored wife, Margaret — that is, Maggie, the cat — asks her defeated, dissolute husband, Brick, to sleep with her, or as she puts it in the original script, ”to make the lie true. ” The ”lie” is telling Brick’s family that she is pregnant.
Herding cats may refer to: An idiom denoting a futile attempt to control or organize a class of entities which are inherently uncontrollable—as in the difficulty of attempting to command individual cats into a group ( herd ).
He is a homosexual representing the homosexuals of the nineteen fifties, so he also represents the social victims that the homosexuals of the time were.
Brick explains to Big Daddy that Maggie was jealous of the close friendship between Brick and Skipper because she believed it had a romantic undercurrent. He states that Skipper took Maggie to bed to prove her wrong.
Brick insists that his friendship with Skipper was clean and true until Maggie got the idea Daddy is talking about. Upon his back injury, she put the idea into Skipper’s head, and he became a lush and died .
In one of her worst “catty” moves, Maggie first tries to seduce Skipper and then convinces Skipper that he is gay. Skipper then calls Brick in order to profess his love for him. When Brick refuses to accept Skipper’s forced realization, Skipper kills himself. This suicide, of course, can be indirectly blamed on Maggie .
This is mainly due to the simple fact that Brick is a failed homosexual who also hates to be a heterosexual. Besides, most of his frustration comes from Maggie’s act of destroying his onetime homosexual friend Skipper. Brick hates Maggie ; he only manages to ignore and tolerate her sight.
Cat On A Hot Tin Roof was nominated for six Academy Awards , but didn’t win a single one: Best Actor – Paul Newman, Best Actress Elizabeth Taylor, Best Color Cinematography, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director – Richard Brooks and Best Picture. Aside from the two acting categories, it lost all the awards to Gigi.
Williams felt that Brick’s repressed sexuality and grief over the death of his beloved pal Skipper was crucial, and he preferred his original ending, which reflected Brick’s weakness and sexual ambivalence.