Watch A Summer Place For Free

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

With the '50s coming to a close, audiences were probably looking for a movie to break away from the decade's repressed mores. Boy did they get one! "A Summer Place" contains what were probably some of the most candid discussions of sex to grace the silver screen up to that point (by which I mean that the words "sex" and "pregnant" get used in the movie). But more importantly, the movie hints at what "The Graduate" would deal with head-on less than a decade later: the hypocrisy of the parents' generation. The parents act like nice, upstanding members of the community, while in reality they're a bunch of cold, spiteful individuals (not to mention bigoted; one of them doesn't want to be around "Jews, Catholics, Italians, Poles, French, Germans, Blacks, Latinos or Asians")*.Obviously it was still going to be a few years before cinema could deal with these issues directly. But for a movie to even mention sex, adultery and divorce in the oh-so-wholesome Eisenhower era was a major leap (at least for 1959). As for Sandra Dee, it's understood that she usually got cast in "cute" roles. I bet that if the executives hadn't tried to control her career so much, she would've graduated to serious roles. Who knows? She just might have become her generation's Meryl Streep. From what I've read about her, she was smarter than these ingenue roles implied (as she put it, she soon figured out that the producers just considered her a piece of property). It was probably some consolation to her that San Francisco's Castro Theater held a retrospective of her movies in 1998, which she attended as guest of honor.*"Dirty Dancing" also addressed this, showing how the supposedly liberal parents didn't want their daughter to associate with the "wrong" kind of people.

Viewing every film as a propaganda-film is, I believe, a very sound way to look on films. Even a seemingly "harmless" film about science is probably the most dangerous propaganda of all, since you are totally unprepared for it watching such a film. It's like with the peasant in medieval times visiting the cathedral and being so intimidated by the grandeur of it all, that he may just accept anything spoken to him in such a place. The "science" program on television is much the same - we do understand about as little about the science as the peasant about the cathedral but we are utterly impressed and accept just about anything coming from a "reliable and scientific" source.Now, a Hollywood-film about love may not seem to be very scientific but is nevertheless most propagandic in its affirmation (often) that what it presents is the view of a majority of people and - could all these people be wrong? Revolution cannot come about without self-esteem. A crushed people is a crushed people and it will only rise if it musters up the strength to fight for justice - but how will it find justice, if it thinks less of itself than it thinks of its masters? The self-evidence of equality will not enter the mind of the slave that accept its role of slave.Insidiously and, because of its other qualities, rather sadly this film somehow comes across telling that there is no difference between lust and love. We might agree that there should not be any difference but one look at a modern porn-film sure tells us that there is and if we are still not convinced about the humiliations going on in these films, we must only consider that rape does indeed exist. We do not have to be in love or anywhere near it in order to perform "the act of love" as it is so "nicely" put.On the other hand, and that is the beautiful part of this film, where there is true love there is also lust for one another, however, this beautiful conception is quickly lost when the young man is portrayed as being an innocent victim of lust that cannot be controlled. Lust can always be controlled, especially if love is involved and that truth is sadly not present in this picture.So, all in all, the propaganda that we are left with is not the propaganda of love and instead the propaganda of lust, which may contain just about any evil under the sun in this power-society.

The picture starts out with a bang. An explosion erupts when the ex-caretaker shows up with his wife 20 years later along with their daughter. It seems that he had a thing going with the wife of the proprietor of the place. Both marriages have headed southward, and at once there is love and lust between the children of the marriages.The movie totally disintegrates after the scandal is revealed. It then basically becomes a picture of the effects of divorce upon children and then their getting into the obvious trouble with the obvious feelings of all concerned. The ending is so contrived where all situations can easily be cleared up through love and commitment.As far as the acting goes, Sandra Dee is just awful as the teenage girl finding love with Troy Donohue. Dee is churlish and shows absolutely no maturity in the role. Donohue is all right, but his performance would have been enhanced by with a stronger actress other than Dee. Women such as Hope Lange, Diane Varsi or Susan Kohner would have been far better choices than Miss Dee.The real acting kudos for the film go to Arthur Kennedy, as Donohue's father, an ex-wealthy man who has turned to the bottle for solace. His wife, played with sweetness and conviction by Dorothy McGuire, looks like she is partly thinking back to her days in "Gentleman's Agreement," in earlier scenes of the film.There is an absolutely standout performance by Constance Ford as Egan's first wife. A hater of humanity, afraid of life, and a bitch at all cost, Ford, as Helen, etched an unforgettable character. You wonder where she got like that until you see her mother in one memorable scene. Too bad that after about a little over an hour in the film, she disappears. Her views towards sex and morality date back to the Dark and Middle Ages. What hurts the film is that when you think of it, Ford's prediction concerning Dee and Donohue was right on the mark. Ford, as Helen, embodied evil. Must evil triumph? Ultimately, at the film ends, we do have the Hollywood understanding theme stated.Beulah Bondi is the lovable aunt who is in the know and attempts to give good advice to the McGuire character.It just a shame that the film fizzles out after the love-nest is revealed.

This movie has only one thing on its naughty little mind - sex. There are those who are getting it, those who aren't getting it but want it, and those who aren't getting it and are pretending they don't want it. One character in the latter category bandies words like "slut" and "harlot" about freely, but she didn't fool me. The four adults have managed to screw up their relationships, but the two very cute teenagers, played by Sandra Dee and Troy Donohue, look as if they'll get by okay if they just follow their hearts. I can't pretend that this is a great movie, but I had fun watching it. That's because the dialogue is way over the top and the actors deliver it with relish. In particular, Constance Ford (as Dee's evil, neurotic mom) and Arthur Kennedy (as Donohue's drunken sot of a dad) get all the best verbal poison arrows, and some of them are quite funny (sometimes unintentionally so). At one point Dee asks Donohue straight out: "Have you been bad with other girls?" That's the temper of the screenplay - everybody says precisely what's on their minds. I have to give the film credit for depicting the utter helplessness of adults in trying to manage their children's lives. Richard Egan and Dorothy McGuire (as lovely as ever) try to behave with stoic dignity which is hard to do when you're sneaking out to the boathouse for a midnight rendezvous and maybe a little you-know-what. The Technicolor location photography is very beautiful, with California doubling, I hear, for New England. And I enjoyed the costumes (okay, okay, I also enjoyed what was in them).