Season of Passion

I read with some interest the comments by Aussie reviewers on this film before writing my own review. They seem to think the spirit of Ray Lawler's play was cut right of the film version of The Summer Of The 17th Doll. My own view just as it was the producer's choice to hire American and British leads it was also his choice to bow to American censor requirements and omnipresent Code still in force.

I sympathize with the the Aussies who complain that one of their own should have been in the lead. Certainly Chips Rafferty who was the biggest name in Aussie cinema at the time could have taken Ernest Borgnine's part. He sure had the size for it.

Summer Of The 17th Doll casts Borgnine and John Mills as a pair of sugar cane cutters who are now at liberty as the occupation is seasonal. Borgnine's size and strength make him respected while Mills reputation and identity come from his love 'em and leave 'em attitude with women. Both have their steady girls Anne Baxter and Angela Lansbury as anchors of a sort.

But these two women are getting tired of being a pair of Adelaides for their Nathan Detroits. Plain and simple these two won't acknowledge they're not young any more. Plain and simple they won't grow up.

And that's a universal situation not necessarily an Australian one. If Summer Of The 17th Doll were remade today I can see Nicole Kidman as one of the women and Guy Pearce as one of the men. And the Code restrictions would be off.

Still while it's not all it could be, Summer Of the 17th Doll is a fine bit of film making.

I Have read the play and seen the film, Ray Lawler wrote the play extremely well. He did something interesting, in writing the play with accents. This is something i haven't seen before.

Leslie Norman however did a poor adaptation of the text version, simple things like getting the city wrong that the play was set in and Australian accents. The accents were bad, the actors did not even seem to try to talk like an Australian. Ernest Borgnine was the main culprit. He had a full blown yank accent happening during the whole film.

This film was a waste of my time, and a waste of everyone else's time who has ever watched it. I does not even deserve a 3 out of 10.

This film was adapted from Ray Lawler's 1955 hit play, about the changes that the passing of time forces on each of us.

The play is considered a landmark of the Australian theatre for its naturalistic portrayal of the Australian working class, and the film has been criticised for having American and British actors in the four main roles, as well as some dilution of the Australian idioms for foreign audiences; and the inclusion of a more hopeful ending than the play. Despite these problems, the story is still an entertaining one, with shades of Tennessee Williams in its portrayal of human frailty.

It is also wonderful to see Sydney and its people in the 1950s, when so few Australian films were being made, and this film is an excellent time capsule of the era.

SPOILERS BELOW While the men Roo (Ernest Borgnine) and Barney (John Mills) have spent 16 idyllic summers in a Sydney guesthouse with a couple of Sydney girls Olive (Anne Baxter) and Nancy (Jessica Noad), this year Nancy has got tired of waiting each year for Barney to return, and found herself a husband. At the same time, Roo has lost his job as the head of the cane-cutting gang, and come home broke for the first time. While Olive finds another girl, Pearl (Angela Lansbury), for Barney, the old chemistry is gone, and the fun is thin on the ground.

Many years ago I unwisely took part in an amateur production of Thornton Wilder's "The Matchmaker". I can still hear the mayhem created by those of us who tried, and failed miserably, to achieve an American accent and those (including, bizarrely, a stray Welshman) who just gave up and spoke their native idiom. Luckily out home-town audience was very forgiving and the local rag took pity on us.

This dire experience came back to me when I saw "Summer of the Seventeenth Doll", but even so, not having seen the original stage play by Ray Lawler, I didn't realise how badly it had been butchered until I saw a TV performance by the Melbourne Theatre Company. The first reaction of an Australian audience will be to switch off because of the hilarious mangling of their native speech by an all-star cast who deserved better and would have been more gainfully employed on another project. Maybe that wouldn't matter to a foreign audience, but then again, perhaps the resultant strange mixture of assorted Cockney, Bronx and other sounds would have a subtly disturbing effect on any listener.

Of more concern is the fact that the play's essence can't be divorced from its Australian roots, which include deceptively dry, laconic and understated speech cadences, without making it pretty meaningless. In fact it's the very antithesis of the overwrought, borderline- histrionic style of "serious" Hollywood films of the era. Anyone less like a laconic Queensland canecutter than the furiously emoting Ernest Borgnine would be hard to imagine. And switching the location from Melbourne to more photogenic Sydney settings, while trivial in itself, is symptomatic of the filmmakers' imperfect understanding of their vehicle.

I don't know that "Doll" is a great play, but it is a good one. However, given the need for some audience-pulling names there was no real prospect of doing it properly in 1959. The accent problem, which is just part of the underlying cultural mismatch, is not to be dismissed, and I've never heard an American or British actor come close to a convincing Australian accent - even Meryl Streep. Even nowadays, with many high-visibility Australians in Hollywood, it would be a problematic vehicle because at bottom it's pretty stagy. It's just one of those movies that shouldn't have been made.

Ray Lawler's play about two tempestuous sweetheart couples coping with the layoff season in Sydney, Australia comes to the screen without much humor and a misguided heart. Sugar cane cutters Ernest Borgnine and John Mills take Kewpie doll collector Anne Baxter and manicurist Angela Lansbury to South Australia to rest up and look for holiday work--but trouble brews with Borgnine, who has mysteriously left his job after fifteen years. Practically without plot, this character study has become, on film, a visual journey rather than an emotional or personable one. Paul Beeson's cinematography is certainly striking, even as the entangled relationships and mercurial tempers at the forefront of the story quickly wear themselves out. Forget about accents, these actors (interestingly, if unsuccessfully, cast) don't even look like Aussie natives. Borgnine's strong sense of character and natural way with a complicated chunk of dialogue nearly saves him, but it was a fundamental error to surround these stars with unknown players who really do sound like Australians. The lively section at the amusement park is full of raucous vitriol and Beeson's playful visual composition, but every scene back at the boarding house is a lost cause. A very strange project, indeed. ** from ****