An American romance-comedy-drama; A story about a confidence artist who arrives in a Southwest American farming town beset by drought. He convinces the despondent residents that he can make it rain, while instilling confidence in a lonely farmer's daughter, skeptical of him, but who is running out of ideas to find a companion.
The best thing to say about the film is the brilliance of the two Golden Globe nominated lead performances: Katherine Hepburn is sincere and heartfelt as the lonely spinster in rural Kansas, and Burt Lancaster works at full pelt, as the witty and charismatic conman, transcending his character with an exalted dreaminess. Both actors help to raise the film a full notch. It is a quaint farce, prepared without much change from its original stageplay, and therefore is mainly dialogue driven, foregoing exterior locations and imaginative camerawork. The screenplay is very sentimental and wistful, often corny in scenes not involving the two leads, and contrived and prosy between the two romantic leads, so much so that the drama is lost to gaudiness by the third act. The fifteen years difference in age between Cameron Prud'Homme and Katherine Hepburn - as father and daughter - seems less convincing on screen, and sometimes Hepburn fails to suppress her higher social scale accent among the rubes. But, overall, the film is a success. It lacks in the comedy stakes and rambles in the drama, but it gains hugely from bold performances, and from being earnest in its old-fashioned sensibility for entertainment.