Paul Newman had two Southern pictures open in 1958, five months apart.

April: The Long, Hot Summer. He’s Ben Quick, a barn-burner’s son with a smile that looks like a dare, walking into Frenchman’s Bend and making himself useful to Orson Welles’s Will Varner. The picture is loosely Faulkner — The Hamlet, plus “Barn Burning” and “Spotted Horses.” The title is stolen from Book Three of the novel. Joanne Woodward plays Clara, the schoolteacher daughter who will not be bought. They shot it in Louisiana heat. They married in January, before it opened. Newman won Best Actor at Cannes.

September: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He’s Brick, the broken favorite, crutch in one hand and a glass in the other, while Elizabeth Taylor’s Maggie works the room and Burl Ives’s Big Daddy refuses to die on schedule. This one is Tennessee Williams, Pulitzer 1955, stripped by the Code of the Skipper story Williams actually wrote. Newman got his first Oscar nomination. Taylor got hers. The picture was a smash. Williams hated what Hollywood did to it. Newman wasn’t fond of the rewrite either.

The joke history almost hides: the screenwriters on Summer had already been watching Cat. Will Varner — the sick patriarch hunting for an heir, disgusted with the weak son, ready to graft a hungry outsider onto the family line — is Big Daddy in a different suit. Then Newman spent the spring of ’58 playing the son that patriarch can’t reach.

Faulkner, even sanded down for Fox, is appetite and class: new blood versus old money, a con man who might actually be the one who can keep the place alive. The ending lets everybody live. Williams is mendacity and inheritance: the lie the family tells so the plantation doesn’t have to look at what the favorite son won’t say. The film ending is warmer than the play. That was the point of the Code.

Summer opened April 3, 1958. Cat opened in New York on September 18.