The Long, Hot Summer

Sixty-one year old widower Will Varner (Orson Welles), in ill health, owns many businesses and property in Frenchman’s Bend, Mississippi, including a plantation. To him, his children are a disappointment, who he sees as not being able to carry on the Varner name in the style to which he has built around it. Son Jody (Anthony Francoisa) has no ambition and does not work, spending much of his time fooling around with his seductive wife, Eula (Lee Remick). He finds twenty-three-year-old daughter Clara (Joanne Woodward) clever, but he feels she also wastes her time on more contemplative pursuits. While most of her contemporaries are married, Clara has been dating Alan Stewart (Richard Anderson), a genteel mama’s boy, for six years. Will would not mind Alan so much if he too thought Alan had a bit of a forceful man in him, which he could demonstrate by actually asking Clara to marry him. Conversely, Jody laments that nothing he does is ever good enough for his father, while Clara plain …