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The two children hide pennies from their aunt until they have saved enough to buy a pair of brushes and three cans of shoe polish. For a short while they prosper, but with the coming of the rains their customers lose interest in shoeshines. Close to starvation, the boy and his sister are accidentally separated; from there the film wanders to an ending that, for all its melodramatic sentimentality, fits perfectly into the picture's curious blend of gutter reality and fairy-tale dreaminess.
The two children. Rattan Kumar and Baby Naaz, flash from delight to fear to solemn determination with startling virtuosity. From her scrawny, seven-year-old frame, Actress Naaz somehow sums up the whole history of her sex, chattering happily as she works with her brother, huddling against him for warmth, patting his arm in a crisis and reassuring him, "I'll manage it somehow." Raj Kapoor trains his camera on them almost without a break, and they have rewarded him by endowing his film with the gentle luster of a miniature masterpiece.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is the fifth of Tennessee Williams' works to be put on the screen, following The Glass Menagerie, The Rose Tattoo, A Streetcar Named Desire, Baby Doll. In his four earlier films, Williams seemed to need a warmup of two backward steps before he could take one step forward, but at least the movement was visible and real. This time, Adapter-Director Richard Brooks has been able to put very little motion in his motion picture. His Cat is a formaldehyded tabby that sits static while layer after layer of its skin is peeled off, life after life of its nine lives unsentimentally destroyed.
But in Williams, Brooks has a rare playwright who can make his static electric, and a blinkered grope toward the past as suspenseful as a headlong crash into the future. Maggie the Cat (played with surprising sureness by Elizabeth Taylor) is young, beautiful, childless; her hot tin roof is the marital bed no longer shared by her husband Brick (Paul Newman), a onetime college athlete now tying on the booze bag every night in search of the "click in my head." Together they have come back to Big Daddy's "28,000 of the richest acres west of the River Nile," ostensibly for a family celebration of Big Daddy's 65th birthday. But the real cause of the gathering is the news that Big Daddy (Burl Ives) may be dying, and Maggie's real mission is to protect her share of the inheritance from Brick's brother Gooper (Jack Carson), a prolific dullard whose major contribution to the world is five little "neckless monsters."