The Long, Hot Summer (1958) on Netflix
Accused barn burner Ben Quick rides into Frenchman's Bend, Mississippi, and takes work on Will Varner's land. Varner owns most of the town and favors the newcomer's drive over his son Jody's.
- Netflix4.0/5
- IMDb7.3/1013,796 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes86%
Trailer
Plot summary
Will Varner owns most of Frenchman's Bend, Mississippi, and his grown children disappoint him. His son Jody, who manages the general store, has no ambition; his daughter Clara, twenty-three and a schoolteacher, has been seeing Alan Stewart for six years without a proposal. Ben Quick comes to town, a drifter accused of burning a barn, hired to sharecrop vacant Varner land while Will is in the hospital. Will returns, furious at first, then comes to admire in Ben the ruthlessness Jody lacks. He decides Ben should marry Clara and carry on the Varner name, and works to bring them together, though Clara is hostile to the crude newcomer.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Long, Hot Summer (1958)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Orson Welles took the role of Will Varner, a character inspired by Big Daddy Pollitt from Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, to settle a US$150,000 tax debt, and said years later: "I hated making Long Hot Summer. I've seldom been as unhappy in a picture."
- When Ritt found Welles unprepared for a scene, reading a newspaper in Spanish instead, he skipped it and shot the next one; he put Welles's later cooperation down to that humiliation, and it earned Ritt the nickname "the Orson Tamer" throughout the Hollywood community.
- At one point during the production, Welles informed Ritt that he did not want to memorize his lines and asked instead that they be dubbed afterwards, and part of the cast was intimidated by his temperamental attitude.
- Newman, under contract to Warner Brothers, was loaned to 20th Century Fox for a fee of US$75,000 while his own contract paid him US$17,500 for each ten-week shot, and he traveled to Clinton, Louisiana, beforehand to study the mannerisms, accent and speech of Southern men.
- Paul Newman married his co-star Joanne Woodward during the production of the film.
- The Faulkner novel it came from, The Hamlet, was renamed The Long Hot Summer for the screen to avoid confusion with William Shakespeare's play Hamlet.
