FILM « In Which It's Getting Awful Long and Hot Out Here »
Friday, December 18, 2009 at 10:24AM 
Swinging Dicks & Easy Tricks
by ELEANOR MORROW
dir. Martin Ritt
115 minutes
Hollywood has ruined all sorts of things: babies talking through voiceover, Nicolas Cage's hair, The Great Gatsby, Martin Lawrence, Molly McAleer, Nicolas Cage's grip on reality, the Care Bears. Our idea of the studio system is a merciless corporate urge towards profit at the expense of something else; on its face this is remarkably similar to the way our president views the financial industry. Sometimes, and this is certainly rare, the studio system creates something from this inclination that is unexpectedly wonderful out of the morass. In 1958, that film was The Long, Hot Summer.
At the tail end of his constantly disappointing Hollywood experience, William Faulkner let Martin Ritt adapt a small part of his Snopes trilogy (mostly "Barn Burning" and parts of The Hamlet) into a feature the studio titled William Faulkner's The Long, Hot Summer. The result is a Southern family drama, of course, but while the milieu is recognizable, the faces are even more so.
Ritt was a New York Jew who became fascinated with the South after attending Elon College in North Carolina. Although Faulkner would monitor the progress of The Long, Hot Summer, he had little interest in retaining any creative control over the project. Ritt would go on to make an ill-fated, roundly horrible adaptation of The Sound and the Fury the next year, before moving on to projects more on his level like Hud and Norma Rae.
Paul Newman plays Faulkner's cipher Ben Quick, substituting for Faulkner's more complex Flem Snopes. He's excommunicated from home because of his criminal ways ("run out of town on a rail") and he rides a barge to a small town almost entirely owned by Will Varner. Whoever got the bright idea of casting Paul Newman as a bad boy and Orson Welles as his antagonist deserves all the acclaim some morons are according Up in the Air.
Most of A Long, Hot Summer is the usual Hollywood romance horseshit. Joanne Woodward plays an uptight schoolteacher who is basically given ideas by the image of Newman's heaving body serenading her with slightly dirty talk outside her window. (The two married after the film was completed.) Woodward was never much of a beauty, but her unique look adds to the Faulknerian edge that makes the film so different from what it appears.
For his part, Welles basically takes the outline of a villain as written in the script and flips it, becoming so sympathetic he's practically the hero. Despite being 20 years younger than the character he played, Welles used makeup and prosthetics to bridge the difference and paint a portrait of a wealthy land baron who has complex relationships with almost everyone. A very healthy romance with Minnie Littlejohn (a youngish Angela Lansbury) didn't hurt matters.
On the set, Welles was a sweaty, mumbling dick in the heat:
"There's nothing worse than having someone start a scene," recalled Newman, "and then the make up guy comes over and starts picking and gluing your nose back on." Newman and Joanne Woodward (who starred as Varner's daughter) sympathized with the classically trained actor who had fallen out of fashion. "It must have been a terrible, terrible feeling for him to have to be confronted by all these young hot shots... trained at the Actors Studio," said Woodward. With the help of the disguise, or in spite of it, he gives a great performance. "There was something you couldn't resist about Orson," said Lansbury. "Even though he was a son of a b--- at times."
On the set Welles was a dickhead at all times. Everyone else in the cast was more beautiful, had more money, and was trained at the Actors Studio. Since the character of Will Varner used a similarly hostile approach towards every single person he met, this concordance of character and actor was not only amusing, but effective. Welles was well into his Marlon Brando-mumbling phase by this point, where after every messed up line reading he likely screamed, "Are you all aware I made fucking Citizen Kane?!?"
The conflict wasn't limited to Welles and the other actors, as a biography of Ritt points out:
While one star fall, another ascended. Newman's charm is so explosive it's all Ritt can do from preventing every other character in the cast from jumping his bones at any given moment. From the first Paul was the perfect repository of all sexuality - men rarely felt threatened by him, and women not only loved him, they felt they understood him. This makes it all the more baffling that he chose to shack us with his first ambulatory female costar, marry her, and spend the rest of his life with her.
The center of A Long, Hot Summer is the romance between Quick and Clara Varner, and it's a strange one. For his part, Quick is perenially coming onto her, ignoring her flighty, conventionally attractive sister, and somehow deriving a certain amusement from her intractability. Welles/Will Varner tells Quick that he wants him to marry Clara; after all, his goal is to populate the world with Varners. (The other candidate is a repressed homosexual who has been "courting" Clara for five years without making a move. At one point he tells her that he "wants to help her.")
Quick's conversations with Clara usually end in her storming off, but occasionally she does express herself truly in the pauses between Newman's primordial Game. She tells him that she feels like she's saving her originality for one person, and that the rest of their life together she'll be sharing herself with that man in equal partnership. "I'm a human being," she tells her father, and he even looks surprised.
Amazingly, some of Faulkner's genius still survives amidst the schlock. Varner's ungrateful son stuffs him a barn and sets it on a fire, then he allows his father out and they weirdly reconcile. Only from a truly disturbed mind could violence and hate be so intertwined with transcendance. The Long, Hot Summer is far from a classic; it's more a bizarre medley of a fearsome artist and a fearful Hollywood director. Because it says more about what doesn't happen on screen than what does, it is one hell of a weird movie to watch today.
Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about Yasujiro Ozu.
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