Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Overheated melodrama, based on Tennessee Williams' play about frustration, greed, lust and impotence wreaking havoc among a wealthy Southern family. Taylor overdoes it as the nagging wife of neurotic Newman, uncertain about his sexuality; Carson connives for the favours of his dying father, hoping to inherit; and Ives is magnificently patriarchal as Big Daddy, ruling the roost with an ego the size of his stomach. As so often with adaptations of Williams, it frequently errs on the side of overstatement and pretension, but still remains immensely enjoyable as a piece of cod-Freudian codswallop.