Classic Film Guide

Summer Place, A (1969) - full review!

Any cinephile who watches this movie without reading the opening credits or doesn't notice its director and the date it was released will swear that it's an early Douglas Sirk-Ross Hunter soap opera. Though perhaps not quite as fine tuned nor polished, it features the same melodramatic characters and storylines in crisp clean Technicolor as the director-producer duo was famous for making in the 1950's and 1960's. This drama was produced and directed by Delmer Daves, who also wrote the screenplay from the Sloan Wilson novel. One plus is the Max Steiner score which became a staple for teen romance sequences in countless, subsequent films.

Ken Jorgenson (Richard Egan) plays a former lifeguard who returns to the Maine island summer resort, where he'd worked years in his younger days, as a millionaire with his bigoted wife Helen (Constance Ford) and comely teenage daughter Molly (Sandra Dee). The resort has fallen on hard times financially and is currently run by Bart Hunter (Arthur Kennedy), the drunken son of the man who'd built it. He now lives there year round with his wife Sylvia (Dorothy McGuire), who'd had a passionate affair with lifeguard Ken in her youth, and their hunk son Johnny (Troy Donahue). Beulah Bondi plays a nosy longtime summer resident at the resort, Jack Richardson plays the spying night watchman Claude; Martin Eric plays handyman at this Pine Island Inn.

Obviously, the two attractive youngsters are drawn to each other as are their former lover parents who, in the end, aren't hypocritical when their children's relationship leads to a teen pregnancy. By the time that happens, Ken and Sylvia have divorced their respective spouses, gotten married, and have literally moved into a "glass house" (designed by Frank Lloyd Wright) at the beach.

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