Other Titles • The Long, Hot Summer • Der Lange heiße Sommer (1958)
Synopses for The Long, Hot Summer (1958)
1.
Paul Newman has his glorious youthful swagger in this southern-fried melodrama, which marked his first picture with Joanne Woodward (they married after shooting ended). The script is a melange of William Faulkner stories, although it appears more under the influence of Tennessee Williams and Picnic than the Nobel Prize winner. Drifter Newman catches the eye of schoolmarm Woodward and her father, a rural Mississippi bigshot (Orson Welles). This is not one of Welles's better moments; he appears to be conducting make-up experiments. There is some enjoyable flapdoodle along the way, in the Freud-meets-Gone with the Wind manner of '50s southern cooking, but the ending is embarrassingly compromised. The same production team would leave out the box-office concessions a few years later on Hud. A studly Newman justifies this description of his character: "I wish I was Ben Quick. He's got the whole state of Mississippi to graze on." --Robert Horton
2.
A witty, involving drama set in rural Mississippi, Martin Ritt's second film exudes the peculiar charm of the Deep South. Martin Ritt combined two of William Faulkner's Southern stories into this immensely entertaining drama starring Paul Newman as Ben Quick, a wandering handyman who arrives in Frenchman's Bend, Mississippi where menacing rumors about his past are circulating. The self-made town despot, Will Varner (Welles), quickly warms to the drifter and, seeing a bit of himself in Ben Quick, Varner takes him under his wing and gives him a job at his store. Disappointed with his own son's lazy demeanor, and fearing that his grandchildren will be the same, Varner tells Quick that he'd like him to marry his daughter Clara (Woodward), a tough-minded schoolteacher. Quick and Clara clash at first, and their scenes together project an electricity that practically jumps off the screen, no doubt aided by the stars' offscreen attraction. Their performance, along with sharp dialogue and strong support from the rest of the cast, especially Welles' portrayal of Will Varner, a Southern variation on his Hank Quinlan from A TOUCH OF EVIL, help make THE LONG, HOT SUMMER a classic.
3.
Ben Quick arrives in town after being kicked out of another town for burning a barn for revenge. Will Barner, who ownes everything in this new town decides to fix Ben up with his daughter, Clara.
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