Sweet Bird Of Youth

Richard Brooks’s 1958 adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was somewhat bowdlerized, but at least it’s intelligent and entertaining within its chosen limits. His second Williams adaptation (1962) is literally a form of emasculation that offers little indication of what made the original play interesting (especially in Elia Kazan’s stage production), despite the fact that Paul Newman and Geraldine Page are called on to reprise their original roles — as a hustler returning to his southern hometown and a Hollywood has-been — and do a fair job with Brooks’s hopeless script. With Rip Torn and Ed Begley (both encouraged to overact stridently), as well as Shirley Knight and Mildred Dunnock. 120 min. (JR)

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