A Summer Place

1959

Action / Drama / Romance

1
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Rotten 70% · 7 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Upright 70% · 1K ratings
IMDb Rating 6.9/10 10 4236 4.2K

businessman summer young love former flame

Plot summary

A self-made businessman rekindles a romance with a former flame while their two teenage children begin a romance of their own with drastic consequences for both couples.

Director

Delmer Daves Photo
Delmer Daves

Top cast

Ann Doran Photo
Ann Doran as Mrs. Talbert
Gertrude Flynn Photo
Gertrude Flynn as Helen's Mother
Richard Egan Photo
Richard Egan as Ken Jorgenson
Helen Wallace Photo
Helen Wallace as Wife of Justice of the Peace
720p.WEB
1.17 GB
1280*720
English 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
23.976 fps
2 hr 10 min
Seeds 2

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by rpvanderlinden 7 / 10

The Kids Are All Right

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).
Reviewed by tdickson 7 / 10

Gutsy Constance Ford

I saw A Summer Place for the first time very recently, and one thing that really struck me was just how gutsy Constance Ford's portrayal of Helen Jorgenson was. Not many actors can pull off a character who has absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Most actors would pressure the director and writer into giving their characters at least a small bit of sympathy, but Ford was excellent at playing someone thoroughly bad. I'm sure she got static for her portrayal when she visited the supermarket or whatever in her daily life.I'm not kidding, Bruno Ganz' portrayal of Adolf Hitler in Der Untergang/Downfall was more sympathetic and likable than Constance's portrayal of Helen.
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