Hot Tin Roof Conformity

The key propeller of William's play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is his exploration of the way in which mendacity, conformity and human faith can both cage and liberate an individual in post-war America. Whilst Richard Brook also seeks to elucidate the significance of the aforementioned concepts, the overt fashion of expression adopted in the film, alongside other alterations, have ultimately warped the literary intentions of the play itself.

It is, of course, inevitable that any shifts in medium should result in a shift in meaning, as the subtleties of language are often lost in translation when reincarnated cinematically. As the lyrical beauty of William's prose which stirs the human imagination is replaced by striking visuals, and the magnetic

Indeed, as the sentiments of the Cold War pervaded Southern America, the ideals behind McCarthyism and the Lavender Scare made conformity integral to survival in a conservative, regimented society. In particular, sexual conformity is perhaps the most significant adjustment made in the film. While Tennessee actively condemns the "conventional mores" of his era and its vehement oppression of the homosexual community, Brook has controversially delineated Brick as a heterosexual man whose relationship with Skipper is as "pure" "clean" and "true" as he insists in the play. While the obscuring of this key feature is in part due to the Hay's Code, it cannot go unnoticed that filmic productions were also expected to conform and satisfy the appetites of the audience. A paradox hence arises, as a critical commentary on conformity as an institutional flaw of American society and by-product of Cold War paranoia has been contorted to please the very people William deplores. The deliberate omission of Straw and Ochello, hyper-sexualisation of Maggie and construction of her suspected affair with Skipper as the primary cause for Brick's "disgust" only perpetuates the conformist ideological that dictated what was socially acceptable in William's