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List Price: $14.98 | | Label: 20th Century Fox
Salesrank: 3268
Released: May 20, 2003 |
| Our Price: $6.81 |
| Used Price: $5.12 |
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MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Orson Welles, Anthony Franciosa, Lee Remick and Angela Lansbury co-star in this riveting tale of life in the Deep South. Provocative and compelling, it simmers with sexual tension, bawdy humor and a powerful clash of personalities. When Ben Quick (Newman), a suspected barnburner drifts into town, he catches the eye of Will Varner, a tyrannical, intimidating patriarch (Welles) who decides Quick is the ideal husband for his spinsterish daughter (Woodward). But once the loner moves in, the two men lock horns, drawing Varner's family into a complex web of emotions and actions that leaves all of them changed forever.
Description of The Long, Hot Summer:
Paul Newman has his glorious youthful swagger in this southern-fried melodrama, which marked his first picture with Joanne Woodward (they married after shooting ended). The script is a melange of William Faulkner stories, although it appears more under the influence of Tennessee Williams and Picnic than the Nobel Prize winner. Drifter Newman catches the eye of schoolmarm Woodward and her father, a rural Mississippi bigshot (Orson Welles). This is not one of Welles's better moments; he appears to be conducting make-up experiments. There is some enjoyable flapdoodle along the way, in the Freud-meets-Gone with the Wind manner of '50s southern cooking, but the ending is embarrassingly compromised. The same production team would leave out the box-office concessions a few years later on Hud. A studly Newman justifies this description of his character: "I wish I was Ben Quick. He's got the whole state of Mississippi to graze on." --Robert Horton
The Long, Hot Summer Reviews:
Old style entertainment 
2009-09-23 - Never saw this on the big screen but on TV as a teenager and think it is one of Paul Newmans best performances (of course there is Cool Hand Luke and The Sting) but his brooding character with a drive to succeed was something that I related to on a personal level so it may not be everyones choice, just mine. The chemistry between Paul Newman and his wife is just great and the other characters bring good performances to the table as well making the movie very entertaining viewing.
excellence 
2009-08-16 - this is one of the best paul newman films in my opinion. the story is simple,direct, and the onscreen fireworks explosive. orson wells is in his prime. the romance is hot, the human drama gritty, real, and revealing. beautifully shot and scripted. must see. it's in my top 25 movies.
Great movie!
2009-07-16 - I have never actaully saw this movie before, I bought it as a gift for my uncle. He said that the movie was very good tho! Sorry that I couldn't help more.
BLAH DOUBLE BLAH 
2009-05-29 -
MY COPY FROM MOVIE MARS HAD SUCH BAD SOUND THAT I LOST PATIENCE
AND QUIT WATCHING.
Mumbles of a summer's night
2009-04-28 - Martin Ritt's famous 1958 film enjoys a somewhat bewildering reputation mostly because this was the film where Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward got together before their marriage. The story has always been that their desire for each other is very much visible on the screen, but in actuality this isn't really the best work either of them has done. They seem more like old friends than hot for one another's pants (although this film really does show Newman off at the height of his physical beauty). Neither of them seems to have mastered the Mississippi accent believably, and instead they mumble in a stagy, Southern-fried way, although they are somewhat eclipsed in this by a bizarre performance of Orson Welles as Woodward's father that just about overwhelms everything else on the screen. As Will Varner, the no-account redneck millionaire who owns the largest house in Frenchman's bend as well as the hotel, general store, and just about everything else, Welles (by this time gigantic in girth) wears a hilariously unconvincing rubber nose and a terrible fake tan (which doesn't even match the color of the nose in some shots). Bellowing and chewing the scenery, he tried to out-Method the Method actors on the screen by mumbling so incomprehensibly almost all his dialogue had to be re-dubbed. It's a fascinating trainwreck of a performance. Poor Tony Franciosa is stuck with the unplayable role of Varner's nervous son Jodie who finds the only relief from his father's emasculating browbeatings by (literally) whooping it up with his hot-to-trot wife, Eula (Lee Remick). The film builds to an unbelievable climax and an even less believable redemption for Jodie, which seems to be announced rather than enacted. It would be foolish to deny that the film's is quite entertaining, but it's not very good, either: despite the fact that the screenplay was cobbled together from multiple stories and novels by William Faulkner (particularly THE HAMLET), it clearly owes much more in texture and characters to the recent Broadway success CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF. And the performances are not very good, even though they're quite enjoyable. You'd be hard pressed to believe the actors in this were among the most famous of the 20th century if you hadn't seen elsewhere films like THE HUSTLER, RACHEL, RACHEL, CITIZEN KANE, and DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES.
