Cat On A Hot Tin Roof Essay

Before we start talking about “cat on a hot tin roof” by Tennessee Williams and the film adaption that soon came later and how the homosexual undertones of the play were not included into the film because of the industry’s strict laws; it must begin with having to address the stigma of homosexuality as a whole. Bringing it back to Thomas Jefferson and his “Bill for Proportioning Crimes and Punishments”, homosexuality or also referenced as sodomy was illegal and under the same consequential group as rape and polygamy. If one person was to be guilty of sodomy, as a male they would be castrated, as a female they would have a hole cut into the cartilage of her nose. Compared to the punishment of first offence Manslaughter where the person guilty
This is what a lot of the world viewed homosexuality as, and because of ignominy that surrounded the community of homosexuals, film organizations were in no way going make anything with homosexuality involved or even a subdued context.
Tennessee Williams was ahead of his time when he wrote the play “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”, he wrote it in such a time where homosexuality was still very much unrecognizable other than a crime and a mental illness. This is why when the movie was created by Richard Brooks, there was not any homosexuality. The film organization, Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) had a set of guidelines for what would and would not be involved in the making of films call the Production Code. Under such guidelines homosexuality was prohibited and there was to be no hint of it on screen, as well as men could not be portrayed as feminine and females were not be masculine (rmm96), alongside many other rules and regulations that movie production companies had to follow. If such rules were to be ignored and the production company released a movie without the MPAA seal of approval, it could