Hot Summer Night

“Ain’t nothing in Chatsburg. Was a factory at one time, but now that’s shut down.” The fastest film MGM ever made at the time (shooting took nine days), David Friedkin’s relatively unknown and lamentably underappreciated Hot Summer Night (1957) lives up to its title and turns the dead-end Ozark town of Chatsburg into a pathetic character in its own right. Known mostly for radio and television work, Friedkin demonstrates no cinematic genius here, but the story, about an unemployed reporter on a budget honeymoon who stumbles onto a bank robbery he thinks might be his big story break to rebuild his reputation and career, is as weird as it is compelling. What will likely bring modern viewers the most delight, however, is the man playing the young, handsome reporter: Leslie Nielsen, the unforgettable star of late 20th century comedy whose deadpan delivery elevated comic masterworks like Airplane! (1980) and The Naked Gun (1988). Nielsen shows no early comedic chops here; instead, his sleuthing reporter character, Bill Partain, gets beat up, kidnapped, humiliated, and shot before all is said and done. Colleen Miller plays Bill’s devoted if insecure new wife Irene (“Say that I’m lovely, say that you desire me”), whose pleas for help in finding her husband fall on deaf local ears, and Claude Akins shows up as a married newspaper deliveryman who agrees to let Irene tag along on his midnight route. Another highlight is Marianne Stewart, who plays Ruth Childers, one of the bank robbers’ lonely ex-girlfriends visited by Bill, who hopes to pump her for information, prompting her to let down her hair, put on lipstick, and attempt to use the summer humidity as an aphrodisiac in the style of A Streetcar Named Desire.