ken_gewertz Review of The Long, Hot Summer

The Long, Hot Summer (1958)

Great talent wasted in butchered version of Faulkner

[3/10 · 15 December 2004]

A great cast, a fine director, and an opulent production cannot save this movie from its preposterous script. The veteran writing team of Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank must have been under tremendous pressure to soften some of Faulkner's themes, because it looks as if they threw his novel "The Hamlet" into a blender and then reassembled the pieces, adding Hollywood clichés by the handful to thoroughly re-familiarize the story. Thus we have the addition of the schoolteacher daughter Clara (Joanne Woodward)with hair in a tight bun who melts when Paul Newman kisses her. There's the contrast between the crude stud (Newman) and his sickly aristocratic rival, Richard Anderson, a motif that hearkens back to Bogart and Leslie Howard in "The Petrified Forest." The casting here is a little strange since Anderson is 6'4" to Newman's 5'9". Then there's the two rivals bidding on Clara's box lunch, a scene that borrows so heavily on "Oklahoma!" that you feel you've somehow stumbled into another movie. But what the hell, Oklahoma's not too far from Mississippi. They do that sort of thing all the time down there, don't they? All of this pales alongside the grimly happy endings that are slapped onto all the dark, Southern-Gothic story lines. Newman sheds tears remembering his terrible childhood, which softens Woodward's heart, and suddenly they are deliriously in love and ready to give Papa Varner the grandchildren he craves. After sadistically taunting and belittling his son Jody throughout the movie, Orson Welles as patriarch Will Varner suddenly forgives and embraces him because he set a fire and tried to burn his father alive! And Will finally gives in and agrees to marry his ditsy mistress Angela Lansbury, uttering the memorable final line, "I like life! I think I may just live forever." Which, I suppose, is what the Hollywood guardians of the national psyche imagined we all needed to hear back there in the last years of the Eisenhower era.