But things are different this time around. Roo and Barney return to find that Nancy has married. Olive has recruited a replacement, Pearl (Angela Lansbury), as Barney's girlfriend. But she seems reluctant to play her role, and threatens to spoil the usual party fun.
There are two other problems. Roo and Barney put on a front of friendship, but bear grudges from an event during the last cane sugar season. Roo, used to being top dog on his cane team, was bested by a younger worker, Dowd (Vincent Ball). Barney sided with Dowd, and Roo split the scene. Now he's broke, and will have to take a job instead of entertaining Olive 24/7.
The unresolved conflict between Roo and Barney is exacerbated by the arrival of Dowd in town. He begins to date Janette Craig, a pretty young woman whom Roo has known since she was a child.
How others will see it. Season of Passion lurks in nearly complete obscurity. Despite a heralded cast (the top three leads have won Academy Awards, while Lansbury has been nominated for Oscars on three occasions), this movie has accumulated a measly 85 votes at imdb.com. Compare that total with Psycho, made a year later, which has (at the time of writing) 125,222 votes.
Clearly, neither American nor British audiences have ever paid any attention to this obscure A-list United Artists film. It has received notice only in Australia, because the movie is based on a 1953 Ray Lawler play, "Summer of the Seventeenth Doll", that, per Wikipedia.com, "changed the direction of Australian drama" and "won the Evening Standard Award for the best new play on the London stage in 1957."
Given the London success of the play, a major studio film adaptation was inevitable. The leads were filled by two Americans (Borgnine and Baxter) and two Brits (Mills and Lansbury), a natural event since they would be box office draws in the largest English-speaking markets. However, working class Aussies practically speak a different language than English, and the accents of the actors were/are anathema to Australians. User comments at imdb.com lambast the film for its casting. At least the location was credible: Sydney, Australia.
How I felt about it. I am not an Aussie. To be honest, I don't care whether or not Borgnine sounds like Crocodile Dundee. In a way, I am glad he doesn't, otherwise I would not be able to understand him. Back in 1988, I went to an Australian restaurant in San Jose, California. The waiter greeted our table by saying "Yarrr Glarr Marr Blarr Darr" or something similar. I think I ordered water.
Certainly, the movie would be more authentic with an all-Australian cast, along with subtitles to prevent the dialogue from being as incomprehensible as Trainspotting. But when watching Casablanca, one of the best movies ever made, absolutely no one complains that the script is in English, while Arabic is the official language of Morocco. And I have to admit that I couldn't care less whether someone from Casablanca complains that the city was never like it was in the movie, even during World War II.
To this point, all I have done is explain why the movie is not bad. Why it is very good has to do with the script, which is excellent, no doubt because of the quality of the source play. As one might expect, the experienced cast pulls off their roles quite well, accents excluded. Borgnine's eventual success in action movies such as The Dirty Dozen and The Poseidon Adventure does not change the fact that by 1959, he had earned his dramatic stripes with Marty.
We can even accept that the Atom Bomber looks like an obese middle-aged plumber, and that Olive ree Baxter is much too pretty to have spent her adult life waiting for Borgnine to return from the sugar cane fields. Also, we are surprised that Janette Craig, despite presumably years of bartending duty in a tavern full of men, remains unattached when Dowd comes calling.