Amores Clandestinos

Despite being almost overwhelmingly melodramatic when treating the subject of sex in the context of its time, A SUMMER PLACE manages to rise above the soap suds when dealing with mismatched parents and a rekindled love affair (DOROTHY McGUIRE and RICHARD EGAN) that almost destroys everyone's happiness.

It's all very lush looking in magnificent color, a Pine Island resort in Maine photographed principally in Northern California along the Monterey coast. Whenever emotions soar, whether quiet emotions or full throttled ones, Max Steiner's music is there ready to lend a helping hand.

As the teen-aged lovers, SANDRA DEE and TROY DONAHUE are just as photogenic as the landscapes they're photographed against, especially when the color cameras turn their close inspection on the two bronzed, blue-eyed stars. While not quite as photogenic, DOROTHY McGUIRE and RICHARD EGAN are quietly having a love affair of their own which must be kept hidden from their respective spouses until a showdown that leads to a rather satisfying conclusion.

The handsome production values and earnest performances are matched well against Max Steiner's famous score. His "The Theme from A Summer Place" is as gorgeous and popular as ever with soundtrack fans.

A SUMMER PLACE can take its place alongside other handsomely produced soapers of the '50s. CONSTANCE FORD and ARTHUR KENNEDY do very well in strong supporting roles and it's all a bit more substantial than it sounds on paper.

Easy to see why Max Steiner's "Theme from A Summer Place" hit the top of the music charts for a long, long time in the summer of '59.

Gorgeous-looking soap opera, with Sandra Dee swaying, swooning and suffering her way through role as young woman determined to do the deed with stodgy, windbreaker-wearing Troy Donahue. Their parents disapprove of course, that is until her father and his mother have an affair of their own! Surprisingly absorbing plot really lays on the melodrama, but so what? It's a roller-coaster ride of teen angst, romantic emotions gone too far, all blissfully filmed in beautiful color. Probably Donahue's best performance, although Dee continues her fight against a thick layer of phoniness that always seems to seep into her work (she's just not a natural, the way Connie Stevens or Tuesday Weld were). The picture is famously scored with Max Steiner's music which forever lives on oldies radio-stations, and will forever live in your head once you've heard it. It's quite lovely, but played ad nauseum. *** from ****

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).

One of the great young love romances ever done on the screen, A Summer Place is the story of two romances, one born and the other rekindled.

Richard Egan and Constance Ford with their daughter Sandra Dee are returning to Pine Island, Maine where years ago before Egan became wealthy as a research chemist he was employed as a lifeguard and where he romanced one of the town beauties. Pine Island is like Kennebunkport, the private reserve of the Bush family. This is the private reserve of several old Yankee families who if they can't trace their ancestors on the Mayflower at least they go back to Puritans who might have found New England more hospitable than Restoration Great Britain.

Egan's rented out several rooms from thinning blue blood Arthur Kennedy and his wife Dorothy McGuire. It was McGuire who Egan loved and lost those many years ago.

Neither Egan and McGuire have found much happiness in their second choice for spouses. Constance Ford, a truly uptight and frigid woman from Buffalo has not kanoodled with Egan for years. You know he's good and ready. As for McGuire's marriage, Kennedy has all the airs of a patrician, but not the money any more. Did he lose it because of his alcohol problem, or is he drinking because the family fortune has gone? It's your choice.

So Egan and McGuire discover each other and Sandra Dee discovers Kennedy and McGuire's son, Troy Donahue. Because of her mother, Dee's led a sheltered life and I'm betting the isolation of Pine Isle with its very few inhabitants hasn't improved Donahue's social skills either. The two kids are sadly a textbook case for sex education.

Feeling betrayed by their parents, all of them when you come right down to it, the young people feel they have only each other. The passion multiplies exponentially.

Right up there with the human cast members in making A Summer Place a big commercial hit for Warner Brothers is Max Steiner's theme, played when Dee and Donahue are together. It's popularity on the radio and jukeboxes sold many a ticket to this film.

Egan and McGuire are also appealing in their way to discover their passions are still the same. The odd spouses out are also turning in fine performances. Arthur Kennedy who was never bad in any film he ever did is both arrogant and yet pitiable as the sad sack alcoholic. The villain of A Summer Place is really Ford, she's made life hell for Egan and Dee. Yet you wonder throughout the film what must have she been like back in the day for Egan to fall for her in the first place and what changed her.

It's Eisenhower era America and the story is dated somewhat, but not all that much. I can see A Summer Place being a candidate for a remake, who would you cast in a remake among today's players?

Wow, Sandra Dee made two big soap opera connections in 1959, starring opposite of two of Hollywood's biggest female stars, Lana Turner in "Imitation of Life" and then "A Summer Place" with Dorothy McGuire. Pure soap on a rope in both of these films.....was in my first year of high school when this film opened and every girl I ever knew of in school and my neighborhood was hooked on this movie. Tell any girl you liked back then you would take them to see this movie, some of them 2-3 times and you had a sure date! Troy Donahue who had a bit role in "Imitation of Life" with Dee is the full blown boyfriend in this soaper. Good performances by the venerable actors Richard Egan, Dorothy Mcguire (in another never ending mother role), Arthur Kennedy and Constance Ford. How about Ford, Sandra Dee's evil, overbearing, sinister mother who wouldn't say a kind work about even Mother Theresa? By the middle of the film she has given the entire audience chills. Arthur Kennedy gave a solid performance as a drunk, down and out misfit father who offers a very sordid outlook on life for the young lovers, Dee and Donahue. Dorothy McGuire who appeared a little too old to me to be in love with the younger Egan gives a soaper-doaper performance extraordinare as the swindled mother who longs for her old boyfriend Egan. Then there is that never ending Max Steiner/Percy Faith theme song from the movie blurting out every few seconds.....no one in their 50s or 60s today could ever forget how many thousands of times they heard that song on the old am radios. Donahue became a soap opera lothario thanks to this film, making other soap suds in "Parrish" with Connie Stevens, and reuniting with McGuire in "Susan Slade" again with Stevens as the love interest. So sad to hear last year of the death of Dee and a couple of years earlier Donahue....... Dorothy McGuire a couple of years ago too. This film must have been the inspiration for any number of television soapers that have stayed on TV over the years.