The Long, Hot Summer (1958)

(On Cable TV, April 2021) Long before becoming a respected Hollywood icon and salad dressing tycoon, Paul Newman was the designated bad boy of the late-1950s-early-1960s and The Long, Hot Summer clearly takes advantage of that persona. A rural melodrama featuring a drifter (Newman), a rural patriarch (Orson Welles!) and his daughter (Joanne Woodward, soon-to-be Newman’s wife), it breaks no new grounds in narrative matters. We can guess how these things go, but the film’s biggest asset is its sense of rural atmosphere, and actors such as Welles and Newman playing off each other. There are links here with Tennessee Williams plays (especially if you follow Newman’s filmography at the time), with later films such as Hud and with a certain kind of rural southern-USA drama that would periodically pop up in Hollywood history later on. For twenty-first century viewers, Welles is a bit in a weird transitional persona here — overweight and no longer young but not yet bearded nor all that old. The melding of three Faulkner stories into one film actually works well into getting to a coherent whole with plenty of interesting side-details. While The Long, Hot Summer does not amount to an essential film (well, except for those Newman and Welles fans), you can see the way it worked back then, and an archetypical kind of southern rural drama.