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Film data

A Paramount Picture
121 minutes
Produced: June 19-August 21, 1956
Filmed on location in Kanab - Utah - USA

Premiere: December 12, 1956


Synopsis

Lizzie Curry, a frightened spinster who has a father and two brothers to care for in their drought-plagued farm outside a small southwestern town, is seemingly content in her day-to-day existence. Into Lizzie?s world comes a sweet-talking, brash young conman, named Starbuck, who not boasts that he can bring rain to the area for just $100, but also convinces Lizzie that she is more of a woman than she herself believes. He transforms her into a woman ready for love.


Critics' reviews

The New Yorker - 1956
"In her portrait of a cow-town spinster, Miss Hepburn never entirely convinces us that she really is just a homely little primitive, but she does succeed in obtaining full lachrymal measure from the plight of a woman who wants a man in the worst way and doesn?t know how to go about capturing one. As her clodhopping Svengali, Mr. Lancaster is most engaging and whether he is enlightening her about her formidable potentialities as a female or shilling the yokels into believing that he can make rain, he is a believable character."

Bosley Crowther - The New York Times - 1956
"In the hands of Katharine Hepburn, who plays this impressionable dame; Burt Lancaster, who plays the faker, and three or four other would-be clowns, this simple and saucy country whimsy gets squeezed so strenuously that it squirts in a dozen directions and splashes humor and sentiment all over the place....Miss Hepburn, who has done her farce performing on a somewhat higher social scale, is nothing daunted by the requirement of doing it as a rube. And even though her manners are quite airy for the Corn Belt and her accent suspiciously Bryn Mawr, she holds her own better than even with a bunch of voracious clowns."

Dave Kehr - Chicago Reader
"It's barely a movie, but Katharine Hepburn and Burt Lancaster make something lightly memorable out of N. Richard Nash's stage play about a flinty Kansas spinster and a traveling con man who promises to make the land green again. The implications may be horribly obvious, but the performances are not."


What Kate had to say

In treatment


What fellow actors, the director and friends had to say

Hal Wallis - Starmaker: The Autobiography of Hal Wallis - 1980
"Kate is intolerant of unprofessional behavior, and with Burt Lancaster, there was trouble. He was late on the set the first day and she gave him hell. She walked into the centre of the sound stage and said: 'I'm here; all these people are here; and if you're not going to be here on time we can't work.' He learned his lesson and was on time for the rest of the shooting. She attributes her punctuality to a childhood experience she's never forgotten. Her family was ready for a trip to Virginia - six of them in two cars. Her father drove off because the children were late. Now she says, 'I think punctuality is something you learn young. Now I'm either on time or early. I think when one is late, it shows you don't care for the person you're meeting.'"

Earl Holliman
"Little Women came up and I said, 'What did you play in that?' She said, 'My dear young man, you never ask a star what she played in a film for which she's famous.'"

Earl Holliman
"If there was a photographer wandering around the set, it's like she had eyes in the back of her head. She knew exactly where he was. She could be carrying on a very deep conversation with the director and if there was a photographer snapping pictures from some place, her hand was right up under the chin."


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