A Summer Place | Richard Egan, Dorothy McGuire | A wonderful Nostalgia Piece, with super Soundtrack

A Summer Place | Richard Egan, Dorothy McGuire | A Summer Place...

DVDs:

A Summer Place

	A Summer Place Richard Egan, Dorothy McGuire Warner Home Video, 2007 average customer review:based on 88 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A wonderful Nostalgia Piece, with super Soundtrack

A Summer Place opened in 1959 and I saw it many times that year. It was the most daring film, and even now it is surprising that it escaped censorship then. The film is entirely concerned with relationships and sex..not a scene is exempt from this theme and it is very good and very crazy. Sandra DEE and Troy Donahue were the romantic teen couple of the times, and they are fabulous in this. Dorothy McGuire, Constance Ford, Arthur Kennedy are right into this steam- room topical film. Richard Egan, forever wooden, is an unintentional laugh in every scene, but with MaGuire he comes alive. Beulah Bondi has a strange, almost lurid encounter with Maguire over Egan's return to the summer place. Constance Ford as Sandra Dee's mother is so bitchy and hateful, she seems to be from some other galaxy, maybe not human.

Arthur Kennedy gives Dee and Donahue very frank, sensual advice in the course of things,and he is always drunk and expressing represssed sexual longings, in a mad, insane way. He is Donahue's father and calls the mother, MacGuire, a "slut," and a "Tramp"..to his son. Kennedy laughs as he makes these remarks to Troy D. It's so vulgar , that it rips apart other films of the period that have little or no thought content, except Sirk's films and Peyton Place..but this is better than Peyton Place..it goes further, in its obsessive compulsive concern with sex. Eveything is sexual, but not subtly; its sexual only in the genital sense..everything everyone does on earth is workiong up to a legal or illegal toss in the hay. This is life..a search for a mate to have at it with, and part of this life is about the fruitless attempt to stop the onslaught of sexual union. See this film and understand a great deal about the 50s and early 60s and the hatred of incarnate flesh, finally vindicated at the end of A Summer Place, but with stiffness, tinges of fear, a slight hint of perversity.Sandra and Troy may be freer, but they are locked into freedom to have sex and nothing else..they've talked about nothing else, and their children will doubtless talk about nothing else. Almost despairing, like two nature driven apples ready to fall into death...,they are both so worn out at the end, over experienced.

There's also 50s idioms all over the place, odd tense usage , and illogical phraseology, almost deliberate, so that what is underscored so much, lack of communiucation, is based not just on differing sexual mores, but on the English Language itself, the grammar..very good!

Lurid, sex in all scenes (talked about mostly), and the theme to A Summer Place that makes you weep for these days to return.

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A Summer Place...

I can't improve on what the others have said concerning this movie. I myself was born when this movie was released. I too, caught it on Late-Night television in the 70's (as a teen). The movie, though 'square' to me, was very effective in getting their message across about Love, and what people would do to get it. Troy Donahue and Sandra Dee were (in my view) cast perfectly in their roles, they were naive kids - twin volcanoes waiting to erupt. Love - wanted, yet forbidden. I can just imagine the "newness" of what kids in that situation feel. Whew! A great movie - Five stars!!

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The Innocense of the 50's and 60's

A movie that made me go back to that place and time. A knockout soundtrack and beautiful Sandy and Troy. What more can a druly teen from the 50's ask for. Thank you for making it available for all to own.

Youth isn't everything- thank heavens!

I was a teenager when this movie was first released, and curiously enough, found the love story between Richard Egan and Dorothy McGuire much more interesting than that of the teenagers...they had more to lose, for one thing., and they were anxious not to hurt their respective partners. Of course, your sympathy was all with them - Egan's wife (Constance Ford) was a bully and a bigot, and Dorothy's husband (Arthur Kennedy) was a drunk. Ford went on to play the same character in many a soap opera - and why not? She was good at being one of those "good" women you love to hate. Arthur Kennedy could (and did) do just about anything. And don't forget the inimitable Beulah Bondi, who had some of the best lines - "He tries to make a virtue out of incompetence." All in all, with the romance in the air and a Frank Lloyd House thrown in, there's a lot to look at, listen to, and enjoy for many years...The plight of the youngsters really has changed though - birth control is available, abortion is legal, and shotgun weddings not nearly as common as they used to be. Some progress has been made. Virginity isn't what it used to be. When you see how hysterically Sandra Dee defends her claim to it, you may think that's a good thing too. Universal miscalculated if they thought Troy Donahue was the heartthrob in this movie - it was Egan's appeal that wowed the girls in my class, and they all hoped they'd look like Dorothy as they grew older. (They already looked like Sandra Dee, thanks to Miss Clairol.) It was the grownups in this movie that made growing up look like a good thing to do...How many times did that happen in the movies?

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