UK drama
1955
color 99 min.
Director: David Lean
CLV: $39.95 - available
           1 disc, catalog # CC1190L
DVD: $29.95 - available
           1 disc, catalog # SUM060
VHS: available from Home Vision Cinema
In David
Lean's Summertime, in which Rossano Brazzi seduces Katharine
Hepburn -- an aging, repressed Ohio "working girl" on vacation in
Venice -- the Continental lover reached his pinnacle and approached
his end. In the next decade, he would be embodied by Marcello
Mastroianni, who was too cynical and self-disgusted to take the role
seriously. By then, even Mastroianni himself knew the game was up. And
by the '70s, no filmmaker could get away with the premise that
Americans needed Europeans for sensual instruction.In 1955,
however, the conventions of the formula were still very much in place,
and Summertime, directed with superb confidence by David Lean,
proved to be a popular addition to the long-running idiom (perhaps
best exemplified by 1942's Now, Voyager).
Katharine Hepburn,
as Jane Hudson, a "fancy secretary" from Akron, arrives in Venice on
her first trip to Europe ("Like it? I've got to. I've saved up for
such a long time"), and Lean devotes loving attention to her initial
encounters -- her struggles with a porter, her bafflement when her
"bus" turns out to be a slow-moving boat, and her stumbling over
restaurant Italian ("Grazie!" "Prego!" "Va Bene!"
"Arrivaderci!"). Lean compares her throughout to a friendly, noisily
philistine American couple who understand nothing of what they see
("Hundreds of paintings -- all of them done by hand"). But Jane wants
desperately to get it right, to respond and appreciate, to become, at
least, an acceptable American traveller. For her, Venice is a series
of revealed enchantments -- churches and palazzi bearing into view at
the turn of a corner, beautifully photographed in Jack Hildyard's
palette of blue and gold, with potted flowers, burnished copper, and
other bits of color shining in the corners. The beauty is
overwhelming, and no one was ever so responsive to "views" as
Katharine Hepburn. Trembling, taking it all in, she's seduced,
ravished even, before she arrives at her pensione.
At the same time,
the Italianness of Venice assaults her and offends her, disrupting her
art paradise. Garbage is thrown into the canals from upstairs windows,
and sex is breaking out everywhere.
In these early scenes, Lean
captures an emotion that almost every American traveling in Europe has
felt at one time or another; the intolerable oppressiveness of beauty
when it's experienced in solitude. Vincent Korda did the sumptuous
interior designs, but Summertime is an outdoor movie. The
sunshine is inescapable; even when the shades are drawn, it spills
around the edges. The peculiar mournful melancholy that Jane feels is
brought to the point of anguish as she sits alone on the back terrace
of the Pensione Fiorini after everyone has left for their dinner
engagements. She turns this way and that, responding to the cries and
bits of music she hears along the canal, then pulls back in
disgust.
Jane drinks quite a bit, and she holds on to other couples,
bravely offering to be the third or fifth wheel for an evening, then
withdrawing at the first sign of resistance. She has the longtime
defenses, the starts and hesitations and refusals of a person with too
much pride to give up the loneliness she hates. Hepburn had done this
sort of thing before -- most notably in 1951's The African
Queen -- and she would do it again in The Rainmaker (1956),
but the skittishness, the little verbal tics, don't seem studied. She
finds a new rhythm for this particular woman who loves pleasure but
fears it, who believes in straightforwardness yet adopts furtiveness
as a way of life.
The love affair itself may be formulaic, but
Hepburn falling in love is a miracle. Her opening up to passion -- she
did it again and again in films -- is the main reason she remained a
star despite all her upperclass mannerisms and by-golly
declarativeness. Suddenly, the heat comes up right through her
cheekbones; her red hair seems to burn. "You make many jokes, but
inside you cry," Brazzi says to her.
Lean's technique has never been
smoother and more tactful, never more supportive of a star giving a
bravura performance in a difficult role. He takes his time, lets the
movie breathe; Summertime's principal drama is Janes's changing
state of mind. In a memorable sequence, she wanders around the city
and it seemingly drawn into the Piazza San Marco by the ringing of the
bells. Hearing the sound, she rushes through crowds; the camera,
suddenly waking up after much drowsy, heat-dimmed contemplation,
recedes before her, then follows her through a dark arcade and out
into the light amid the nowclangorous ringing. This is tremendously
romantic rhetoric of a high order. Lean, I think, geniunely identifies
with Jane's love of beauty and her fear of it, her longing for
sensuality and her terror of being engulfed by it. Her fervency and
stiffened resistance seem emblematic of the great and single-minded
director's whole career.
-- DAVID
DENBY
Credits
Director: David Lean
Screenplay: David
Lean, H.E. Bates
Based on the play The Time of the Cuckoo
by: Arthur Laurents
Producer: Ilya Lopert
Associate Producer:
Norman Spencer
Cinematography: Jack Hildyard, B.S.C.
Production
Design: Vincent Korda
Editor: Peter Taylor
Music: Alessandro
Cicognini
Transfer
This edition of Summertime has
been specially mastered for laserdisc from a digital transfer of a new
35mm intermediate negative, made from the film's ycm
(yellow-cyan-magenta 35mm separation negative).