This is a Pygmalion variation with Katharine Hepburn as a plain Jane from the Kansas plains and Burt Lancaster as the grinning con man who aims to teach her to dream. His name is Starbuck-to emphasize the dual aspect of his appeal-and he could charm the rains right out of a drought-ridden sky for a town that comes to believe that, "Once in your life, you have to trust a con man." Hepburn's intensity as the awakening spinster, whose willful verbosity matches Lancaster's bravado, challenges the pointed whimsy of N. Richard Nash's script, which was born as a teleplay and then staged on Broadway. "(Director Joseph Anthony) gave the film a moderately stylized air that suited it to perfection, taking note of the barren earth where reality had been eroded to create a blankness from which metaphor could rise" (Gordon Gow, Hollywood in the Fifties).