Isn't this more faux Tennessee Williams than Faulkner
-
SeanJoyce — 16 years ago(April 20, 2009 11:46 PM)
I'm always under the impression that this was a Williams creation. I'm not too familiar with Faulkner, but everything about this film screams Williams. I wonder if he doctored the script, or was involved in the production uncredited.
It bears some strong similarities to "Orpheus Descending", which was made into
The Fugitive Kind
two years after this film, and starring Marlon Brando.
Decent time passer, worth watching Welles shamelessly chew up the scenery (not as gracefully as Burl Ives in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
). Other than that, it's pretty forgettable, and not much to reccomend.
"
if that was off, I'd be whoopin' your ass up and down this street.
" ~ an irate Tarantino -
mariahfan-1 — 16 years ago(April 23, 2009 08:07 AM)
how could you say that and by the way you forgot to mention that Joanne was also one of the stars of the fugitive kind witch actually opened nationally 25 months after this did on 5/8/1960
"why are you married to him then if you can't work with him how do you live with him?" -
kaream — 16 years ago(August 13, 2009 05:39 AM)
Yes, you're right. The scriptwriters Tennessee-Williams-ized the whole thing, pretty much the same way that they tended to Hollywoodize Williams' own works.
Williams was a hot property for movies in this same period, 1950s to mid-'60s: The Glass Menagerie 1950; A Streetcar Named Desire 1951; The Rose Tattoo 1955; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof 1958; Suddenly, Last Summer 1959; "The Fugitive Kind" (Orpheus Descending) 1960; Summer and Smoke 1961; The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone 1961; Sweet Bird of Youth 1962; Period of Adjustment 1962; The Night of the Iguana 1964.
The difference is that while Williams' plays tend to be eminently filmable (with a bit of cleaning up here and there), Faulkner, even more than being a terrific storyteller, was one of the most important and experimental prose stylists of the 20th century. You just can't film this stuff the way it's written - you have to savor the rhythms of the language, and let the story itself gradually sink in and grab hold of you. And his stories themselves tend to be about as unHollywood-y as you can get; not a great deal happens in most of them. They're much more about character than plot, and what plot there is yields itself up very subtly, so that it sneaks up on you - which is quite a trick for a writer, if you think about it. Another problem is that Faulkner's dialogue seems appropriate as you're reading it, but it's almost always completely unrealistic sounding to actually be spoken by actors.
Faulkner never made any money to speak of from his own writing, and "prostituted" himself by working on (uncredited) scriptwriting for Hollywood during the 1930s and '40s out of sheer desperation. Even after winning the 1949 Nobel Prize for literature, his work never sold well. Whereas audiences came to see Williams movies, content that they had partaken of high culture and (mostly) understood what was going on, even if they actually missed many of the subtleties left intact from the original plays by the scriptwriters and studio bosses.
The section titled "The Long Summer" is a standalone portion of Faulkner's quasi-novel The Hamlet, and is fairly straightforward, relatively speaking, in its telling. But a proper movie of it, or together with the related sections of the book, would surely have been a disastrous flop. In all of Faulkner's work there is not a single character resembling Paul Newman in the slightest bit; his characters were not just flawed, they were mostly petty and mean and ugly, and sometimes heroic in their humanity in spite of themselves. His only characters at all likeable were a few children, a few women, and a few blacks. Eula Varner was a sweaty piglet who just happened to be too beautiful for her own good. Even so, it was entirely unnecessary for the film The Long Hot Summer to have been so utterly garbled and twisted around from even his basic story and characters.
So the movie is what it is - it has to stand or fall on its own. Just don't think it's Faulkner. See some of the User Comments posted, for instance:
Great talent wasted in butchered version of Faulkner
it looks as if they threw his novel "The Hamlet" into a blender and then reassembled the pieces, adding Hollywood clichs by the handful
Has as much to do with Faulkner as pigs have to do with flying
William Faulkner must have cringed if he got to view this Hollywood concoction presumably "based" on some of his stories. The silly and mish-mash plot has little or nothing to do with Faulkner other than a snippet here and there from many of his disparate and distinct novels and short stories, thrown together willy-nilly and then left to devolve into a story only Hollywood could dream up.
Please don't blame Faulkner for the silly story and plot, and if you've never read Faulkner, I'll let you know right now that this movie is the very antithesis of his writings. -
brtsi — 16 years ago(October 04, 2009 12:29 PM)
I watched this piece of crap last night. It made me want to read Faulkner, not because there was anything good about the movie, but because I have to know why Faulkner is so highly regarded. I now live in the deep south. I imagine there are few vestiges of Faulkner's South remaining but still I might glean some insight here and there. I don't mean to imply I think Faulkner was not a good writer, I want to read the real Faulkner, not see some screenwriter's version of Faulkner.
I too thought of Tennessee Williams as well as Burl Ives (Orson Welles) as I watched this. Every character was charicatured (sp?) in my opinion. I think that's because of WHEN the movie was produced. The actors were acting as if in a stage play. Reminded me of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but not in a good way. -
kaream — 16 years ago(October 06, 2009 02:30 AM)
If you're interested in reading the real Faulkner,
The Hamlet
isn't a bad place to start. You might also want to look at his
Collected Stories
, or
Three Famous Short Novels: Spotted Horses, Old Man, The Bear
. "Spotted Horses" is a very slightly revised version of the fourth and final section (they aren't really chapters) of
The Hamlet
, titled "The Peasants".
In any case, take your time - reading aloud to yourself works best, or at least under your breath, at a normal conversational pace, to savor the language and the rhythms of his writing. Faulkner is very sparing of punctuation, and he needs to be read that way, nearly in a continuous flat monotone, with very slow waves rising and falling; don't supply commas or periods in your reading where there are none printed. People hardly ever shout in Faulkner, but he will let you know when to raise your voice; otherwise, don't. When Freeman says "Hell fire" at the approach of Flem with his horses, this is said expressionlessly, as is nearly all the rest of the dialogue. Even dialogue containing a question should be read in monotone - "What in the hell is that?" - without emphasis on any of the words. These are country folk talking; they would never say "What in the
hell
is
that?
"
Parts of "The Bear" (from
Go Down, Moses
) contain run-on sentences with hardly any punctuation at all, for pages on end. Be sure to read them just this way; don't supply your own punctuation, or you'll ruin the effect. Maintain that flat continuous monotone, with very slow waves of subtly rising and falling. If you can do a Southern accent, try it out, but it isn't at all necessary; it's the flatness that makes it work, or not.
Leave
The Sound and the Fury
until you're accustomed to Faulkner's general style. The opening section of the book, "April 7 1928," about Benjy, is written to be deliberately confusing. Don't worry about it; it all becomes clear as you go along. Your edition will probably have an Appendix discussing the various characters, as a Foreword, but save that until after you've finished reading the Benjy section. Here the speaking style is more natural, less flat, with both whites and blacks, children and adults - but again, don't overdo it.
Hope this helps. -
talynir-1 — 16 years ago(November 14, 2009 08:29 PM)
Now that you mention it, I suppose that's why I like it.
However, just to give your question a thorough answer, I will share the fruits of my investigation into that whole "based on The Hamlet by William Faulkner" or other notes that say it's based on the "Snopes" stories of WF.
I read them expecting this story. It was not there. The characters were there, in all their seedy, backwater hick glory - but the story we all dig was not there. This is what I remember from it
The story that is there is basically a character study of the town. Clara is oblivious and/or disinterested in the attentions of the men surrounding her, who have been sniffing after her every since she hit puberty (which she is not much past - she is by no means a grown woman like in the movie). She goes out riding with a guy and they get jumped by a bunch of other guys.
You are given to understand that they beat the crap out of her escort and she was raped by at least one, if not all of them. She refuses to talk about it and stays in the house until it becomes obvious that she's knocked up. Her father is shamed by the fact that this happened and he pays a skeezy, dirtball drifter named Snopes to take his daughter off his hands, and they ride off to go live in squalor.
So this story is predominantly the product of a screenwriter. You can also be thankful that they left out several of the numerous appalling characters mentioned in these stories. The slow boy with the crush on Uhla in the 80's remake is loosely based on a mentally disabled character in the stories whose main character trait was his bestial attachment to a certain cow.
Enjoy the movie, and stick to Williams vs. Faulkner. You'll be glad you did. -
mike-848 — 12 years ago(July 04, 2013 10:09 PM)
It can't be Tennessee Williams because I can't stand any films made of his stories and I wouldn't have been able to watch this film all the way thru.
Tennessee Williams characters are without a doubt the most annoying, over the top characters that belong in an asylum.