Down In Faulkner’s Land-Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman’s The Long, Hot Summer

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

The Long, Hot Summer , starring Joanne Woodward, Paul Newman, Orson Welles,

Oh sure today, today in 2016, everybody who looks back at Mister James Crow times down in Mississippi thinks that the singer/songwriter Nina Simone with her Mississippi Goddam and the fearless writer Mister James Baldwin (fearless in rooting out the white side of the equation in racism too, praise be) in a million books and essays including The Fire Next Time understands that they had it just about right about that benighted place (still benighted, still some third-world country place deep in these United States if you look at the numbers). But back before all hell broke loose as the black civil rights movement charged ahead to change at least a sliver of the old historical narrative, back when historians took their cues from a Southern interpretation of the American Civil War and its Reconstruction aftermath, back when William Faulkner blazed the southern skies you would get a very different view, a magnolias and mint juleps view of that hell-bound place. After watching in 2016 and not in say, 1956 the film under review, Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman’s The Long, Hot Summer, based on a couple of segments of Brother Faulkner’s work you would have that very different view right on your screen. Would come away with a more gentile view of what went down in those Mister James Crow days.         

Of course this one centers on the small fictional town of Frenchman’s Lick and of its over-the-top king hell king largest land-owner (and owner of every other socially and economically vital institution in town, and proud of it), one Will Varner played by larger than life actor Orson Welles. Centers too, as such things go, on those below Varner, those who want what he has, and quick too, one Ben Quick, one “barn-burner,” the worst name you could call a man in rural Mississippi, played by Paul Newman. Yeah, Ben Quick, who despite his manly physique and those piercing blue eyes is nothing but what we Yankees would call “white trash,” or at least that is what he has to live down. Over the course of the film we see Ben transformed from fugitive outcast to sitting right in Will Varner’s big house, a big house complete with those magnolias and mint juleps and obliging “colored” servants smiling to beat the band. Sitting right there with Junior Varner who had been blessed with none of Papa’s devilment, nothing of what old Will saw in Ben Quick the minute he laid eyes on him.

Now, no question, one part of the story line here deals with the rise of a young upstart working his way into the old-time Southern oligarchy but that would make for a rather dreary film. The other side of this one is the romance, naturally. Or rather romances from young Varner’s lustrous wife (played by a young Lee Remick) the subject of many longing looks by the young studs around town to old rascal Will’s affair with Minnie Littlejohn who tries to make an honest man of him to the primo romance that drives that part of the film Mister Ben Quick’s chasing after Southern Belle cum old maid (at twenty-three, go figure) Miss Clara Varner played by Joanne Woodward. Naturally prim and proper school marm Miss Clara is totally repulsed by upstart Ben, well maybe not totally for she has eyes for old gentile decaying aristocrat Alan of the weak blooded downwardly mobile clan. But Ben is nothing if not relentless and before you know it Miss Clara falls under his spell. And the old “New South” will emerge from that coupling-that is if those damn civil rights agitators, those outsiders, don’t rile up the “colored” and bring hell and damnation on everybody’s head.