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DVD 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
This is a great movie, and one I would recommend to anyone who enjoys Paul Newman and also his wife. They make a great team in this movie, and I have to also say delivery was FAST.
Southern Fried Masterpiece
Well now, what do we have here? It is nothing less than one of the best and sexiest southern fried dramas from the 1950's. This adaptation of several works of William Faulkner is a tour de force for everyone involved. How lucky are we to have two great films on southern family life starring Paul Newman come out in 1958? This film is a fine companion piece to "Cat On A Hot Tin Roof", a bit more upbeat than "Cat" but still full of sound and fury.
As Ben Quick, Paul Newman ignites the screen and fairly burns down half of Mississippi in the process with his incredible magnetism. He brings to Quick all he as to bear as an actor and creates one of his early memorable performances. Just watch him as bare chested he hugs his pillow on the hot veranda while watching Joanne Woodward through a screen door sitting up in her bed trying to ignore him, or his walk across the Varner yard early on in the film, his interactions with Orson Wells or Tony Franciosa. He is every inch the "mean and dirty" barnburner everyone thinks he is. He is just what the Varner family and Clara Varner in particular need to feed their respective fever dreams brought on by the heat of this particular August in the south.
Hitting her marks in a great performance is Joanne Woodward. She being a true daughter of the South comes to the table with and extra barrel loaded. As Clara Varner she is both needy and steely, a magnolia ready to be plucked but at that same time fearful that she will be passed over and left to wither on the vine. Her scene in the general store after closing time with Newman is just about one of the steamiest love scenes ever filmed this
side of "Picnic". Miss Woodward here in this film is pure magic to watch and in combination with Paul Newman the pair become an alchemy of fireworks and lightning bugs on a summers night.
Adding to the fine cast is Lee Remick, Tony Franciosa, the incredible Angela Lansbury and the equally and always impressive Orson Wells. I would go on about each of them but I think it best to let them surprise you. That's half the fun of the film.
The score by Alex North is memorable and one of his best. The cinematography by Joseph LeShelle captures the hazy heat of Mississippi. And Martin Ritt's direction of all parties concerned is perfectly on target. Be sure to check some of his other collaborations with Newman, "Paris Blues", "Hud" to mention only two.
Pour yourself a tall sweet tea, kick off your shoes and open the veranda doors and let the breeze of this long hot summer envelope you.
I'm no trembling little rabbit with unsatisfied desires
Joanne Woodward plays the 22-year-old maid with a mama's boy beau and Paul Newman the menacing - well, roguishly and charmingly menacing, anyway - prince with eyes for her in Martin Ritt's THE LONG HOT SUMMER.
As one of the dvd extras tells us, Woodward and Newman were hot in love during the filming of this movie, and their chemistry translates well onto the screen. The story, a young girl coming of age and finding love, didn't do much for me. Orson Welles, hidden behind a movable rubber nose and a thick layer of insta-tan, mumbles in an incomprehensible southern accent and chews the scenery in just about every scene he's in.
This is purportedly based on a number of short stories by William Faulkner. Save for some character names and the use of barn burning as a plot device the Faulkner link is pretty tenuous.
If you enjoy romantic melodramas, or are a fan of the stars, it's likely you'll enjoy this one more than I did. I thought it was just okay.
Elizabeth Taylor has never been sexier than as Tennessee Williams's hot-blooded Maggie "The Cat" Pollitt, prowling around her boudoir in a slinky white slip. That's how you know her alcoholic, ex-football-player husband, Brick (Paul Newman), must have more than just his leg in a cast. It's the 65th birthday of wealthy (but dying) southern patriarch Big Daddy (Burl Ives), and his sons Gooper (Jack Carter) and Brick have come to suck up to him for $10 million in inheritance money. Gooper is a family man and father to a brood of "no-neck monsters"; youngest boy Brick is papa's favorite (as if you couldn't tell from the fellow's names), but hasn't sired progeny. Maggie is definitely in heat, but Brick refuses to sleep with her because he suspects her her of being unfaithful with his best... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Elizabeth Taylor - Paul Newman - Burl Ives Director(s): Richard Brooks DVD Release Date: Released the 19 September 2000 Usually ships in 24 hours
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From the Terrace is one of Paul Newman's lesser-known films, but it's a worthy showcase for the actor's developing screen persona. Like Butterfield 8, this is a slick, prestigious adaptation of a John O'Hara novel, about loose morals and forbidden love among the wealthy elite. Director Mark Robson lacks the mastery of melodrama that Douglas Sirk would've brought to this material, but he's still on target with O'Hara's tale of a prodigal son (Newman) who rejects his late father's steel mill in favor of big-business conquest, only to find his trophy wife (superbly played by Newman's off-screen wife, Joanne Woodward) straying into the arms of her former fiancé, while he falls in love with a socialite (Ina Balin) with whom he's much more compatible. A well-tuned drama of... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Paul Newman - Joanne Woodward Director(s): Mark Robson DVD Release Date: Released the 20 May 2003 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Based on a Larry McMurtry novel, this Martin Ritt film was a testament to the sex appeal of the young Paul Newman. Playing the title character--a total rotter who, by the end of the film, has double-crossed or screwed over everyone he knows, including his hard-working father and brother--Newman turns him into an intriguing antihero. Things are tough on the ranch and Hud's dad (Melvyn Douglas) needs help, but Hud is too busy looking out for number one, even as things fall apart. And guess who's going to land on his feet? Beautiful black-and-white cinematography by James Wong Howe won an Oscar, as did performances by Douglas and Patricia Neal. --Marshall FineMore Info about this DVD Actor(s): Paul Newman - Melvyn Douglas - Patricia Neal Director(s): Martin Ritt DVD Release Date: Released the 02 December 2003 Usually ships in 6 to 7 days
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This silky smooth film noir pits gruff police detective Dana Andrews, stiff and blunt in his street-bred manners, against a cultured columnist and acidic wit (Clifton Webb at his prissiest) in a battle of wits during a murder investigation. The cop is a romantic hiding under a hard-boiled exterior who falls in love with the beautiful victim through the portrait that hangs in her apartment. Gene Tierney, whose heart-shaped face mixes the exotic with the girl next door, brings the poise and calm of a model to her role as the object of every man's gaze and the target of a killer. Laura, handsomely shot in dreamy black and white, is the first and best of Otto Preminger's cool, controlled murder mysteries. In the gritty world of film noir it remains the most refined and elegant example... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Gene Tierney - Dana Andrews Director(s): Rouben Mamoulian - Otto Preminger DVD Release Date: Released the 15 March 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Paul Newman gives one of the defining performances of his career, and cemented his place as a beautiful-rebel screen icon playing the stubbornly tough and independent title character in Cool Hand Luke. And before he became familiar as a sidekick in 1970s disaster movies (Earthquake and the Airport movies), George Kennedy won an Oscar for playing Dragline, the brutal chain-gang boss who tries to beat loner Luke's cool out of him. It's a classic rebel-against-the-repressive-institution story in the line of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest or The Shawshank Redemption. Certain moments have become classics--particularly the hardboiled egg-eating contest, and the immortal line (drooled by Strother Martin, as a sadistic redneck prison officer), "What we have... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Stuart Rosenberg DVD Release Date: Released the 25 June 1997 Usually ships in 24 hours
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