AWARDS AND HONORS

Paul Newman won the award for Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival for his role in The Long, Hot Summer. Director Ritt was nominated for a Golden Palm for the film.

Martin Ritt was nominated for a DGA (Directors Guild of America) Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures for The Long, Hot Summer.

The screenwriting team of Irving Ravetch and his wife Harriet Frank Jr. was nominated for a WGA (Writers Guild of America) Award for Best Written American Drama.

The Critics' Corner: THE LONG, HOT SUMMER

"What's more, the whole show, in natural settings shot in color and CinemaScope, has the look and the atmospheric feeling of an afternoon storm making up above the still trees and sun-cracked buildings of a quiet Southern town on a hot day. Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr. have developed a tight, word-crackling script that lines up the bitter situation in quick scenes and slashing dialogue. Martin Ritt has directed for tension-for scornful, sarcastic attitudes on the part of the principal contenders. And those roles are effectively played. Paul Newman is best as the roughneck who moves in with a thinly veiled sneer to knock down the younger generation and make himself the inheritor of the old man. He has within his plowhand figure and behind his hard blue eyes the deep and ugly deceptions of a neo-Huey Long. He could, if the script would let him, develop a classic character. Joanne Woodward is also excellent as the independent daughter who snarls not only at the arrogant intruder but likewise at her bluff, uncouth old man. And Orson Welles, so help us, does a pretty good hard-hitting job making a shrewd, fierce and bloated vulgarian of this small-town tycoon. He even puts on a Southern accent that you can hardly understand. Anthony Franciosa is somewhat miscast as a weakling son of the South and so is Richard Anderson as a puny Mississippi mama's-boy. But Lee Remick fills the bill precisely as a beautiful but dumb young wife (to Mr. Franciosa's giggling husband) and Angela Lansbury makes a good fleshy old doll."
– The New York Times

"The Long, Hot Summer...bears only a remote resemblance to the William Faulkner tales on which it is based... it is a pretty exciting movie. Faulkner is as hard to kill as a Mississippi water moccasin, and his energy coils and snaps and hisses in the hundred distortions of the story. To begin with, the young man of the "broad, flat face [with] eyes the color of stagnant water" has been transformed by Hollywood into a dreamy-looking cinemactor named Paul Newman-but Newman's performance as Ben Quick, before the script blunts it, is as mean and keen as a cackle-edge scythe. And Eula Varner, she of the "kaleidoscopic convolution of mammalian ellipses," is divided into two slender young beauties named Lee Remick and Joanne Woodward-but Woodward plays her part with a fire and grace not often seen in a movie queen. And old Will Varner, "thin as a fence rail and almost as long," is transmogrified into the Falstaffian figure of Orson Welles -but Welles, in the first role he has done for Hollywood since Moby Dick, demonstrates decisively that if in the meantime he has scarcely improved as an actor, he is in any case a whale of an entertainer, even when he overacts and over-accents his Deep South dialect."
- Time Magazine

"The Long, Hot Summer is a simmering story of life in the Deep South, steamy with sex and laced with violence and bawdy humor...This picture is strikingly directed by Martin Ritt... Scriptwriters have done a phenomenal job of putting together elements of stories that are actually connected only by their core of atmosphere, Faulkner's preoccupation with the rising redneck moneyed class and their dominance of the former aristocracy. There are still holes in the screenplay but director Martin Ritt slams over them so fast that you are not aware of any vacancies until you are past them. It is melodrama frank and unashamed. It may be preposterous but it is never dull...the locations pay off in the authentic flavor well captured by cameraman Joseph LaShelle. Highlighting the diverse and contrasting moods is the fine score by Alex North."
- Variety

"This amalgam of Faulkner's stories "Barn Burning" and "The Spotted Horses" (which is part of his novel The Hamlet) turned out to be highly commercial and hugely entertaining...Ben Quick is one of those arrogant-on-the-outside, vulnerable-on-the-inside roles that Newman could do better than any other movie actor, and he and Woodward have some electric, strong scenes together. Martin Ritt directed with a crackerjack popular screenplay by Irving Ravetch and his wife, Harriet Frank, Jr."
- Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies

"Disparate incidents from short stories by William Faulkner are intelligently amalgamated to depict conflict within the family of Varner, town boss of a small Mississippi community. Although undeniably an actors' piece, The Long, Hot Summer shows how perceptively Martin Ritt handles intimate relationships."
- The Oxford Companion to Film

"The ending is an unconvincing cop out, but it can't spoil the film's compulsive dramatic tension (or a marvellous comic cameo from Angela Lansbury as Welles' long-suffering mistress)."
- Jane Edwardes, TimeOut Film Guide

"Frank Jr. screenplay is peppered with the typical ingredients of 1950s soap opera right down to the de rigeur syrupy theme song. But what sets The Long, Hot Summer apart from other Peyton Place wannabes is the sizzling sexual tension between soon-to-be-married Newman and Joanne Woodward in their first film together-electricity so palpable it short-circuits the overblown melodrama...The real surprises are Franciosa, who wrings out all of Jody's angst with heart-breaking intensity, and the young Remick (in only her second film), whose vivacious, sexy, uninhibited portrayal of the vapid Eula is irresistible. Such involving performances (along with gorgeous location shooting in Louisiana) distinguish The Long, Hot Summer from similar '50s fare and make the material seem far better than it is. Amazingly, after all of the film's domestic disturbances and psychological warfare, it leaves a warm, fuzzy glow. Not exactly true Faulkner, but pure Hollywood."
- David Krauss, www.digitallyobsessed.com

"Yet another overboiled soap opera from Jerry Wald, the producer of the gold mine Peyton Place [1975], this all-star vehicle was concocted by folding a half-dozen Faulkner stories together. The result is reasonably well-written but still plays like watered-down Tennessee Williams. The efforts of a mostly-excellent cast bring the characters to life, and the real-life romance team of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward bless the story with more than a little dignity. The verdict is, that for this kind of movie, The Long, Hot Summer is not bad at all."
- Glenn Erickson, DVD Savant

"Well-blended William Faulkner short stories make a flavorful, brooding drama...Excellent Alex North score, weak finish to strong film."
- Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide

"Busy Peyton Place-style family brawling saga with sex on the side, flabby as narrative but compulsive as character study."
- Halliwell's Film & Video Guide

Compiled by Andrea Passafiume