The Long, Hot Summer (1958)

Directed by Martin Ritt. Starring Paul Newman, Orson Welles, Joanne Woodward, Anthony Franciosa, Lee Remick, Angela Lansbury, Sarah Marshall, Richard Anderson.

Feels like a long, lukewarm movie. Newman’s drifter is picked up by Southern belles Woodward and Remick and taken back to their plantation to work a vacant farm, and their domineering father (Welles) sets out to groom the young man to marry his daughter. Movie is based on multiple William Faulkner works (mostly the novel, “The Hamlet”), but it feels like second-rate Tennessee Williams, especially to anyone unfamiliar with the original stories (which this adaptation resembles only in a few key details and general characterizations). Cutting dialogue and a compulsively magnetic Newman performance holds it together even when the movie meanders and stalls. Southern accents tend to be all over the map, which is worth a few unintended chuckles, but direction and photography are more consistent. Welles, behind makeup so dusky and greasy he practically looks like the vengeful Moor he played a few years prior in Othello, is an unpredictable (and uneven) force of nature—with that jowly scowl and furrowed brow of his, he looks more than a little like 1970s Marlon Brando. Provides an uncommon instance when a real-life couple (Newman and Woodward, who would go on to get married the same year the film was released) generates sparks as an onscreen couple, but her dramatic performance separated from that chemistry is surprisingly lacking; she’s even upstaged by co-star Remick in a few departments, such as flow of expression and sexual energy. Script adaptation by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr. Alex North composed the score.

61/100