This NEEDS a remake...

(Yes I know this was 4 years ago, but...)

You should know that some people lose interest in having sex with their partner, and it has nothing to do with being attracted to the same sex as you are implying.

While that is certainly true, the fact is that in the stage play it is all but explicit that the root cause of Brick's issues is that he's a repressed closeted gay man. His extreme depression over Skipper's death is heavily implied to not just be because his best friend committed suicide which Brick may or may not have triggered by rejecting him (which again was heavily altered for the movie), but because (at least on some level) he reciprocated Skipper's feelings and still rejected him. They bowdlerised a lot in translation to film - they had to; this was the era of Hays Code censorship, after all (see Hitchcock's 'Rope' for another example of this: in the play it's based on, the two main (male) characters are explicitly in a relationship; in the movie, all explicit mentions are removed but the main characters are still absolutely intended (by Hitchcock's own admission) to be seen as being gay). In the era of Hollywood censorship, presenting homosexuality could literally only be done through subtext in direction and dialogue. Tennessee Williams (the writer of the original play) was left extremely unhappy by the screenplay primarily because all but the most subtle homosexual undertones concerning the relationship between Skipper and Brick were cut. It's a little odd to be so militant about Brick's sexuality while at the same time admitting you know nothing of the actual source material...

Yes, in this movie adaptation Brick is presented as, at best, asexual but that is only because he essentially had to be. It most certainly wasn't Williams' desire that he should ever have been presented as something other than the character he originally wrote: a repressed closeted gay man through whom Williams could critique the homophobia of the era.

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Actually, that might add a new layer of interest to a 65 year old play!

But no, I don't think the world needs a remake of this one, I don't think the central conflict will work in a world where coming out of the closet is so much easier than it was in 1955. Most young people, when shown this play, won't understand why Brick didn't just marry Skipper and have kiddies with a surrogate, and also won't sympathize with Maggie's trying to hold onto Brick instead of encouraging him to come out, and live a gay life while they stay friends.

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