Film

Carnal desires boil over in sun-baked rural Mississippi in Elia Kazan’s throbbing Tennessee Williams (who else?) adaptation. Carroll Baker’s callow child bride is at the center of a psychosexual cyclone that pits her cotton farmer husband (Malden) against a smooth-talking Sicilian (Wallach). The story’s explosive eroticism set off a storm of protest from moral watchdogs, with Time declaring it “possibly the dirtiest American picture ever legally exhibited.”