MGM's luck wasn't great in the late 50s but it held for this Tennessee Williams adaptation - Dore Schary bought it as a vehicle for Grace Kelly who then retired but Elizabeth Taylor stepped in and for all her vocal limitations was a perfect horny housewife. Paul Newman wasn't a big star at the time - rising but not big - but he was offered the male lead (I think Ben Gazzara may have turned it down) and it worked like gangbusters.
Newman doesn't sleep with Taylor because of guilt over his friend more than being gay for his dead friend but that works on its own terms. There's still Burl Ives' bombastic Big Daddy, and Jack Carson and Madeleine Sherwood as Taylor's dreadful in laws (because it's Williams she's more of a shrew he's amiable but waeak).
It's a solid movie. Richard Brooks suits it, at that stage. Taylor, Newman and Ives all get a chance to monologue.
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