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The Long, Hot Summer (20th Century-Fox) bears only a remote resemblance to the William Faulkner tales on which it is based (The Hamlet, Barn Burning). The Hamlet, in which Author Faulkner aired the moral midden of Yoknapatawpha County in an ecstasy of disgust, is particularly strong stuff, and Producer Jerry Wald clearly had to clean up his subject for the screen. In the process, unfortunately, he converted Faulkner's county into a community almost as corny as Al Capp's Dogpatch, and reduced all the poetry of degradation to the customary commercial serving of fresh ham and pot likkah. And he replaced the emotional ingredients of The Hamlet's grand, grotesque romance—half arsenic, half cantharide—with a conventional love story that is at least as sweet as Coca-Cola.
For all that, 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.
"Ah put down a big footprint," he sneers at his no-'count son (Anthony Franciosa). "Ah said. 'Heah. Step in. Fill it.' But you nevah did ... Go fishin', boy." And at his daughter he roars, "Wheah's mah crop? Whut follahs me?" When her elegant young man dawdles on the way to the altar, Welles tries to hog-tie her up with Ben Quick. "Ah am no tremblin' little rabbit full of smolderin' unsatisfah'd desires," screams Actress Woodward when Quick puts up his proposition. "[Sex] is not enough . . . not nearly enough!" But Quick has an answer for that: "The world belongs to the meat eaters, Miss, and if you've got to take it raw, take it raw."
If the moviemakers had taken this advice, The Long, Hot Summer might easily have been a great picture instead of just a mighty entertaining one.
Merry Andrew (M-G-M). Danny Kaye is like Aladdin's lamp. Only when an audience rubs him the right way can the genie come out. No audience, no magic; and the cold glass eye of the camera is worse than no audience to an exquisite empathist like Kaye. But even in the worst of his pictures—and Merry Andrew is considerably better than that—Comedian Kaye exhibits the common trait of the greatest clowns, who are not funny because of what they do but because of what they are.