The screenplay, inspired by the 1946 one-act play of the same name by Tennessee Williams, was written by Francis Ford Coppola, Fred Coe and Edith Sommer.
Owen Legate (Redford), a representative of the railroad that provides much of the economic base for the town, comes to Dodson on an unpopular errand.
Wood plays Alva Starr, a pretty flirt who finds herself stuck in the small town and is attracted to the handsome stranger.
For her performance, Wood received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Motion Picture Drama.
Willie Starr, an unkempt girl, tells the story of her sister Alva to Tom, a boy whom she meets on the abandoned railroad tracks of Dodson, Mississippi in the 1930s.
He meets Willie, the youngest daughter of the house, and rents a room for the week, while remaining mysterious about his motives for being in town.
The men at the party, including a conductor named Mr. Johnson, eagerly await Mama's oldest daughter Alva.
Alva and Owen meet in the kitchen, where she tells a story about a worker who took her dancing at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis.
She makes an excuse to bring him inside and then leads Owen into the garden to show him her father's red-headed scarecrow.
It was the first film Houseman had produced where he joined the project after the lead star had already been selected and the script had already been written.
Houseman wrote in his memoirs that "all important decisions on the picture would be made by Stark, who (though he could not have been more thoughtful and pleasant) was in the habit of making them capriciously, unilaterally and often without informing anyone until long after they had gone into effect.
[11][12] In a contemporary review for The New York Times, critic Bosley Crowther called the film "as soggy, sentimental a story of a po' little white-trash gal as ever oozed from the pen of Tennessee Williams or out of the veins of scriptwriters in Hollywood" and felt that the two main characters were "wholly implausible.
"[14] Filmink argued the film "is fatally sunk by continued attempts to make Redford’s character sympathetic.