• 13 Dec, 2025 *

A film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ play of the same name, I watched this because it was featured in the Criterion Channel’s new collection of queer-coded cinema during the Hollywood Production Code, the famous censorship code that defined American movies for over thirty years. And you can feel the impact of censorship on this one even without being familiar with the original play.

This is a proud entry in the genre of "lock a small group of awful people together in a room with each other and press play". While most of the characters have some redeeming qualities–as one of them notes towards the end of the play, a family crisis brings out the best and the worst of everyone–the overall impression here is that everyone here sucks. Of course, I love stories about awful people, so no complaints here.

The setting is a 1950s plantation in the Mississippi Delta, and the focus of the story is that the plantation owner and head of the family, Big Daddy, is dying of cancer (we’re led to believe he’s got very little time left indeed) but has just been told he’s fine actually. His son Brick is an alcoholic former football hero who is unhappily married to Maggie (probably our most sympathetic character and to whose restlessness the title of the film is referring), with no children; his son Gooper is listlessly married to a woman named Mae with five or six children who all seem pretty awful. The imminent death of the patriarch means, of course, that Gooper and Mae are scheming to win control of the estate from the father who can’t stand them, while Brick seems absolutely indifferent to the ordeal despite Maggie pleading with him to put in a little baby bit of effort.

It is eventually revealed that the reason Brick is an alcoholic is that he was driven to drink after his, ahem, "best friend" Skipper’s suicide. Though you can feel the censor’s scalpel excising the script here, it’s absolutely wild that this passed through a censorship code which decreed that queer relationships were sexual perversion and that "Sexual perversion, and any inference to it, is strictly forbidden." Maggie was jealous of Brick’s relationship with Skipper, and later on Brick, when arguing with his father, calls his relationship with Skipper as "love." Perhaps, like Albertans with rats, the censors were so unfamiliar with the mere concept of queerness that they didn’t know what to look for?

But you can feel the way that this moment, this heartache, this difference is meant to be the beating heart of the story, but it ends up just . . . not being that. Brick reconciles with Big Daddy and teaches him the true meaning of love; and then as a peace offering to Maggie he agrees to have sex with her so they can have a baby (at least in part because she just lied and said she was pregnant as a way to get Mae to shut up). All’s well that ends straight, I guess?

All of this makes for a conclusion that feels somewhat incomplete. As if Brick can simply decide to stop being a broken man, as if one conversation is enough to make a cantankerous bitter old man start being kind to his family and to the people who work his plantation for him. Because, the censors’ work aside, we have in this film a brilliant portrait of people who are restless and broken and miserable; it’s difficult to imagine these people suddenly becoming happy in so little time.

Still, it’s easy to see why this was so well regarded by critics, even if Tennessee Williams and some other contemporaries felt that it was a disappointing, watered-down adaptation. There are still some stellar performances here1, and maybe in a world without the context of knowing about the play, of knowing about Hollywood’s censorship in the era, some of these weaknesses would stand out less than they do.

This film is very much shot as a play, which is something that is almost unheard of in contemporary cinema. It is something of a shame that the theater has fallen out of favor; it is nice to see these tight, character-focused, dialog-driven stories from time to time.↩

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