I bandied a post dealing with big, bright, late-1940s MGM musicals with the word “summer” in their title, like “In the Good Old Summertime” (1949) and “Summer Stock” (1950), both with the legendary Judy Garland.
Then I thought about Disney pictures with a summertime theme, such as “Summer Magic,” a forgotten 1963 feature starring the adorable Hayley Mills.
For a dimmer view of summertime, I thought about taking a look at film adaptations of Tennessee Williams' tortured Southern Gothic plays “Suddenly, Last Summer” (1959) and “Summer and Smoke" (1962).
But instead, I’m limiting our theme to two movies that may surprise you. They’re special because they’re iconic of the 1950s, but have a refreshingly adult tone. And they indeed revolve around that magical summer season.
Katharine Hepburn is the lonely Jane Hudson, a small-town American school teacher seeking a change of scenery on vacation in Venice, Italy.
She certainly finds beauty in the romantic setting, but finding actual romance was not on her agenda. But one evening, idly watching the birds flutter about while sitting alone at an outdoor café, she senses that someone is watching her.
The dashing Renato de Rossi (Rosanno Brazzi) is instantly smitten with this unusual woman. But he is a married man, which presents ethical problems for Jane even as she falls in love with him.
The film traces their relationship and the contrast between Jane’s solitary existence founded on her valued principals and Renato’s more liberal perspective on life, love, and the rules of marriage. “Summertime” is an examination of two very different people coming together, albeit briefly, and the ultimate decision one of them must make.
Yes, it is rooted in mid-20th century morality, but these disparate people navigate their circumstances in a very grown-up way. The film is a look back at a time when marriage and fidelity were viewed in a stricter sense; when people took it more seriously. (Just ask Ashley Madison's 37 million customers.)
Part of the power of “Summertime” is the personal and societal confines within which Jane lives her life. The rules she follows in America are thrown into disarray by the more freewheeling view of sex and love that Renato—and Venice—presents.
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| Katharine Hepburn, as lonely Jane Hudson, has a contemplative moment. |
Famed New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther said about the film upon its release in 1955: “The curious hypnotic fascination of that labyrinthine place beside the sea is brilliantly conveyed to the viewer as the impulse for the character’s passing moods...It is Venice itself that gives the flavor and the emotional stimulation to this film.” He was right.
I talk about this film in my prior blog post from May 2014, which looked at the various films in Hepburn’s career that closely aligned with her personal life.
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| Troy Donahue and Sandra Dee in a typical publicity still. |
Based on a popular novel by Sloan Wilson, who often took a critical eye to (then) modern-day customs, culture, and mores, this film adaptation looks at the relationship between two adults from very different walks of life. However, the burgeoning romance between their teenage children takes center stage as the film progresses.
Handsome Richard Egan is Ken Jorgenson and the underrated Dorothy Maguire is Sylvia Hunter. As the story unfolds, we learn that 20 years earlier, while college students, Ken and Sylvia carried on a romance. But their lives changed, and they moved on from each other.
Sylvia married Bart (Arthur Kennedy), an alcoholic whose family money has run out. Ken married Helen (Constance Ford), a scornful woman who has nothing but contempt for anyone who is different from her or doesn’t share her view of the world.
Ken, who worked his way through college, is now wealthy; Sylvia, who came from money, has turned to running Bart’s family home as an inn.
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| Dorothy Maguire and Richard Egan |
When Ken and Sylvia meet again at a resort on Maine’s Pine Island, they furtively rekindle their romance.
Throughout all the grown-up dramatics, we meet Ken and Helen's teenage daughter Molly (Sandra Dee) and Sylvia and Bart's son Johnny (Troy Donahue). As Ken and Sylvia rekindle their romance, Molly and Johnny fall for each other too.
Things get complicated when Ken and Sylvia divorce their spouses to remarry. Meanwhile, Molly and Johnny continue to see each other. And when Molly and Johnny reunite at Pine Island, Molly gets pregnant.
While the film became a touchstone--and later a point of mockery--for 1950s morality, upon reflection “A Summer Place” has some rather progressive ideas about hypocrisy and tolerance. In one scene, Ken angrily calls out Helen for her racial and ethnic bigotry. Like teenage pregnancy, these were not subjects that were broached much in Hollywood pictures in the '50s. Perhaps it took a seemingly simple soap opera to present them to the public.
Egan and Maguire are good, but the movie provided an early showcase for teen icons Dee and Donahue. The flip side of the teen stars’ iconic status is the reality that, after the white hot flash of fame fizzled, both Dee and Donahue led sad, troubled lives rife with drug and alcohol abuse and, for Dee, health problems that included anorexia and depression.
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| Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta in "Grease" |
The 1970s both sent up and paid homage to the various tropes of the 1950s. In fact, the visual inspiration for the early seaside scenes in 1978’s hugely popular and enduring musical “Grease” come directly from “A Summer Place.”
Summer Playlist
Listen to “Theme from a Summer Place” here. Corny kitsch to some, I can still remember hearing this song for the first time when I was a small child in the '70s. I was in the back seat of our station wagon, my parents in the front seat (Dad was driving). The song came on the radio (probably an oldies station), and I was transfixed; I’ve loved it ever since.
Summer Reading
As a summer blog bonus, here’s my take on two good books—one a brand-new biography, the other a not-so-new autobiography—that I recently read, about two icons of Hollywood’s Golden Age: Bob Hope remains a household name, if somewhat vilified today; Ray Milland was a big star in his time, but his name is not well remembered.
By Richard Zoglin, Simon & Shuster, 2014
When author Richard Zoglin, a contributing editor and theater critic for Time magazine, was writing Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-up in the 1970s Changed America, he interviewed many stand-up comedians and asked them who their influences were. He was shocked by the fact that none of them cited Bob Hope.
Zoglin set out to find out why. He meticulously researched Hope’s past as the child of immigrants from England, who settled in Ohio in the late 1890s. (Hope was born in 1903.) The book illustrates how Hope ventured into vaudeville in the 1920s, which took him to Hollywood in the 1930s, where he had a rather inauspicious debut; but despite early fits and starts, he eventually conquered the movies while establishing himself as a leading radio star well into the 1940s.
With World War II came the opportunity to entertain the troops, and his efforts in the Pacific, Europe, and points in between, were tireless; Zoglin interviews some of the people who knew him at that time. During the war, he also became a newspaper columnist and published several books, including a post-war memoir.
If radio, movies, and publishing weren’t enough, Hope smoothly entered the new medium of television in the ‘50s. After years as America’s top funnyman, the tide began to change in the mid-‘60s with the advent of the Vietnam conflict.
While Hope was determined to entertain a younger generation in a new kind of war, he was increasingly out of touch. His films were decreasingly good or popular. While his telecasts of troop visits, especially Christmas specials, were highly popular, Hope was becoming synonymous with the ‘older generation.’ Everyone seemed to know it but him.
Anyone who grew up in the ‘70s, 80s, and ‘90s who remembers his stiff, cue-card laden skits in a variety of television appearances will know that Hope had outstayed his welcome. When he died in 2003 at 100, the token tributes were made but it was clear the world had moved on.
Regardless of how you might feel about Bob Hope as a man or a comedian, this is an unsentimental, unbiased, yet revelatory biography of the most significant entertainer of the first half of the 20th century. It explains the factors that led to Hope becoming an unrelatable antique, despite the fact that he pretty much invented stand-up comedy as we know it today. And it reveals what a cypher he was to almost everyone who knew him, including his children.
Hope’s impact on American comedy cannot be denied, but he allowed his reputation to be spoiled by an ego that insisted he hang around, never knowing when to quit.
By Ray Milland, William Morrow and Company, 1974
In 1974, Ray Milland published this look back on his young life and early years in Hollywood. The book is a colorfully written, fascinating window on growing up in Wales in the 1900s and entering Hollywood as a very young man in the early 1930s.
Milland became a big star at Paramount in the early '40s. Although he excelled at light comedy, he eagerly ventured into darker territory, beginning with his Oscar-winning portrayal of an alcoholic in the then-daring “The Lost Weekend” in 1945. This the first Hollywood film to deal realistically with the subject of alcoholism. It's still pretty potent.
His career slipped a bit in the ‘50s, but he leveraged the new medium of television to star in two series. In the early '60s, he continued to appear in sporadic films, even directing two cult-classic science fiction movies. In 1970 he played Ryan O'Neal's disapproving father in the extremely popular “Love Story.” But he was well past his prime by then.
Sadly, after that it was strictly Z-class movies all the way to the end, when he died in 1986. This was probably not the way he would have preferred his career to wrap up. But the book doesn’t get that far; it stops at a point in Milland's life when he was still a well-known veteran of Hollywood's Golden Age, and he was happy to talk about those days.
When he wrote this memoir, Milland’s memories were still within reach. But now, 40 years hence, the bucolic Wales of the 1900s and the energetic Hollywood of the 1930s are consigned to history. (That's why autobiographies like this are important; they serve as records of now-vanished times, people, and places.)
I recommend the book, although fair warning: His views on women, gays, and minorities are dated. For example, at one point he recounts how he excused himself from a dull party, blithely noting that his hosts were a couple of “house faggots from Beverly Hills.” I actually thought that was so absurd an offhand comment that it was funny.
If you can get past those dated aspects, take the book as a record of Ray Milland’s life, times, attitudes, and professional experiences. He published it in 1974, a year that sits five years after the end of the tumultuous '60s, when everything began to change in ways overt and subtle.
Like many people of his generation in the entertainment industry (see Bob Hope above), Milland may not have taken seriously women's lib, the burgeoning gay rights movement, or many of the other societal changes that were happening at the time, but happening they were. He couldn't know the changes that would continue to occur for the remainder of his life.
Perhaps the point of his book was a way to look back before it was too late. "Wide-Eyed in Babylon" is a proven actor's entertaining, episodic memoir of a most interesting life during very interesting times--before the times changed.
Side note: You can find an inexpensive back copy on Amazon.com, as I did. A used hard cover was only 85 cents, plus $3.99 shipping. (Or you can have my copy.)
