Not quite as good as his best work (which is Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, obviously, the play NOT the straight washed major motion picture, a film so misguided that not even Elizabeth Taylor’s stellar performance could save it from being an ultimately disagreeable adaptation) but weird and dramatic and claustrophobic enough to be enjoyable. While everything is there technically, the setting, the backstory, the characters, the dialogue, my god the dialogue! I couldn’t help but feeling it was a little too small of a story to be a full play, let alone a movie (which it was adapted into, with Elizabeth Taylor again). The real downside in my opinion was that there were only two real characters in the whole thing, the waspish Mrs. Venable and the wicked, dead Sebastian. Catherine Holly has the rudiments of a character but really doesn’t get the time to fully become one, and maybe that’s the point, controlled and managed as she is by her family and her nuns.

In the end I think this was middling work for Williams which still puts it beyond a lot of playwrights but isn’t indicative of his full potential as a dramatist.