The Long Hot Summer
Martin Ritt (1958)
This is an unusual piece of Southern Gothic: it ends with all the main characters, goodies and baddies, apparently set to live happily ever after and – more bizarrely – together, in the same large house. Martin Ritt’s film is also a bit puzzling in relation to two other American pictures released in the same year: Touch of Evil and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The latter peculiarities centre on the imposing presence in The Long Hot Summer of Orson Welles.
Welles plays Will Varner, who owns most of the businesses in the small town of Frenchman’s Bend, Mississippi, where the action is set, and is Mr Big in more ways than one. Varner is meant to be sixty-one – a reminder that Welles’s overweight led to his playing men much older than he actually was: he was still in his early forties when he made The Long Hot Summer. Once you see him in close-up here, it’s hard to take your eyes off his garish make-up. Welles’s Varner isn’t just a redneck but a very red face; against this flesh tone, the dyed grey hair plastered across his forehead looks all the weirder. Ritt’s film was released in March 1958, just a month before Welles’s Touch of Evil, in which the film’s director gave one of his finest performances, as the corrupt police chief Hank Quinlan. Part of its success is Welles’s thoroughly and naturally convincing appearance as the grossly obese and seedy Quinlan. Even allowing that The Long Hot Summer is in Technicolor and Touch of Evil black and white, you wonder who felt that Welles needed the excessive cosmetic aids that, in combination with his shallow acting, turn the tyrannical Will Varner into a cartoon villain.
Although the opening titles describe the film as ‘William Faulkner’s The Long Hot Summer’, there’s no Faulkner book of that name as such. The screenplay by the husband-and-wife team of Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr (the first of their eight scripts for Martin Ritt movies) actually derives from three Faulkner sources: Spotted Horses (1931), a novella; Barn Burning (1939), a short story; and The Hamlet (1940), a novel – one part of which is called ‘The Long Summer’. According to Wikipedia, the Ravetches were also ‘inspired by Tennessee Williams’ 1955 play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ in shaping some of their characters. Again, you wonder why – when Richard Brooks’s screen version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was already in the works and would open in cinemas only five months after The Long Hot Summer. Although Paul Newman stars in both films, the most salient similarities – physical and psychological – are between Welles’s Will Varner and Burl Ives’s Big Daddy Pollitt. At the start of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Big Daddy has just returned home after clinical tests; at the start of The Long Hot Summer, Varner is – crucially for the plot – absent from home, receiving hospital treatment. Big Daddy is terminally ill; although he doesn’t yet know it, he already fears it. Varner isn’t on the way out but is very anxious to secure a kind of immortality through the grandchildren he doesn’t have. His ineffectual son Jody (Anthony Franciosa) is married to the town flirt Eula (Lee Remick) but still childless. His daughter Clara (Joanne Woodward), a schoolteacher with a mind of her own, shows no signs of getting her long-time beau, Alan Stewart (Richard Anderson), a Southern gentleman mother’s boy, to the altar.
The Long Hot Summer has a striking prologue: a barn bursts into flame; Ben Quick (Newman), the assumed culprit, is banished from the area by a local judge. After a journey across water and along country roads, Ben hitches a lift with Clara and Eula into Frenchman’s Bend. His reputation as an arsonist precedes him there but Jody Varner isn’t in the know. With his father away, Jody lets Ben become a sharecropper on a vacant farm. When Varner senior returns he’s furious with his son for hiring a barn burner but soon takes a liking to Ben’s shrewd opportunism and ambition – two qualities, among many, that are conspicuously lacking in Jody. Will Varner’s first assignment for Ben is to sell a collection of unbreakable wild horses to local men. Mission accomplished, his reward is a job alongside Jody in Varner’s general store. Ben’s initiative soon sees him taking the lead there; his reward for that is an invitation from the old man to move from the nearby farm into the Varner residence. Will Varner sees the well-named Quick as both his entrepreneurial heir and a prospective husband to Clara – and thereby puts both his children at daggers drawn with upstart Ben.
Martin Ritt made some good films (Edge of the City (1957), Hud (1963), Sounder (1972), Norma Rae (1979)). The Long Hot Summer isn’t one of them, despite its Faulkner bases and all the other talent involved – in front of the camera and behind. Ritt’s task wasn’t helped by persistent tensions during production involving Orson Welles, whose eventual performance is as defective as it’s impossible to ignore. You can tell from his line readings and facial expressions that Welles understands how the part should be played yet there’s a disconnect between that understanding and what comes across. Despite his histrionic bombast, Welles’s portrait of Will Varner conveys a kind of contempt for what he’s being asked to do. (He’s on record as saying, years later, that ‘I hated making Long Hot Summer. I’ve seldom been as unhappy in a picture’.) But Welles isn’t the only problem. Although Ritt shot on location (in Louisiana), the film often has a studio-bound feel and not only when the actors are seen moving against what’s evidently a static background: the interiors of the general store and the Varner house always look like sets. As for Ritt’s extras … When another barn fire starts up in the climax to the story, the locals hurrying towards the plume of smoke are unmistakably a bunch of people obediently responding to ‘Action!’
Two of the four Ritt films mentioned above (Hud and Norma Rae) were scripted by Harriet Frank and Irving Ravetch but The Long Hot Summer isn’t their finest hour either. Despite the title, very little in the melodramatic storyline simmers – most of the plot twists are flambéd. Ben tells Jody a cock-and-bull story about buried treasure from the Civil War; Jody digs up a bag of coins; his father promptly picks one up and informs his son it was minted in 1910; Jody is crushed. When Clara refuses to wed Ben on her father’s say so, Will misunderstands her remarks about Alan Stewart; immediately drives to the Stewarts’ place and instructs Alan to get on with marrying Clara; discovers he’s got the wrong end of the stick; angrily smashes Mrs Stewart (Mabel Albertson)’s tea service; drives away even more quickly than he got there. Humiliated, desperate Jody locks his father in a barn, sets the barn on fire but can’t go through with it. The strength of ‘hate’ and ‘love’ that Jody shows in this episode instantly changes the father’s mind about his son – and, also at a stroke, appears to save Jody’s marriage.
It’s as obvious as in the simplest romantic comedy that Ben and Clara, despite her sustained hostility to him, are made for each other yet the sinister, cruel elements of the material make it hard to enjoy their journey to eventual union as you would enjoy them in a romcom. Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward nevertheless make The Long Hot Summer worth watching, even if their Methodical talents also expose more brutally Orson Welles’s style of acting. Newman and Woodward’s near contemporaries with an Actors Studio background don’t fare so well, though – Anthony Franciosa because he’s in a thankless part, Lee Remick because she’s miscast. Jody Varner can’t control his flighty young wife, let alone the men who hang around the Varner house of an evening, hollering and wolf whistling Eula, who’s tickled pink. Lee Remick tries hard but she’s too fragrantly ladylike for the role. Angela Lansbury, vividly eccentric as Will Varner’s long-standing, long-suffering mistress, delivers the most likeable turn among the supporting cast.
The ghastly old patriarch is a widower: when he eventually insists to Clara how much he adored her late mother, his daughter is improbably persuaded that he’s a nice person after all. It’s very different when Ben melts Clara’s resistance by telling her he’s never set fire to property in his life – that his rascally father was the barn-burner in the Quick family and the source of Ben’s reputation. Paul Newman had a genius for playing men whose easy charm masked emotional brittleness. It comes through here whenever Ben bristles at a reproof from Clara – and especially powerfully when he reveals his unhappy family history. When Varner’s barn starts to burn, local men assume that Ben’s responsible and form themselves into a lynch mob. In the nick of time, Clara arrives in the convertible that gave Ben his first ride into Frenchman’s Bend and tells him to get into the car. I couldn’t understand why they didn’t drive straight out of town (albeit suddenly good ol’ Will pacifies the mob, telling them he accidentally started the fire by dropping his lighted cigar in the hay). But at least Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, once they’d departed the shoot, got married in real life, and stayed that way for the next fifty years.
27 January 2024