A Summer Place **** (1959, Troy Donahue, Richard Egan, Dorothy McGuire, Sandra Dee, Arthur Kennedy, Beulah Bondi) – Classic Movie Review 3382

Fifties teen heartthrob Troy Donahue (aka Merle Johnson Jr) made his film début in Man Afraid (1957) and became a Warner Bros contract player with the stardom conferred on him here in A Summer Place, enjoying his first star billing in a movie.

He won a Golden Globe as Most Promising Male Newcomer. Later, discussing his role opposite Sandra Dee, he said: ‘What I did basically was knock up Gidget, and you just don’t do that!’

Producer-writer-director Delmer Daves’s 1959 romantic melodrama may be soapy but it is highly effective. Though nowadays it enters into the high camp arena thanks to its generous helpings of sun, sea and, well if not sex, then at least sauce.

In Daves’s screenplay based on the novel by Sloan Wilson, a family stays at the Maine holiday beach mansion of the family’s now successful father’s adolescence, leading to the recurrence of the torrid affairs of yesteryear and the kindling of young love (Donahue and Sandra Dee).

Arthur Kennedy plays drunken Bart Hunter, who has inherited his family-owned summer resort mansion on Pine Island, off the Maine coast, where he lives with his wife Sylvia (Dorothy McGuire) and their late teenage son Johnny (Donahue). Richard Egan, plays the Buffalo-based self-made millionaire businessman Ken Jorgenson, Constance Ford is is wife Helen, while Dee is his daughter Molly. The Jorgenson family have rented rooms at Bart’s mansion inn for the summer. So the stage is set for the self-made businessman to rekindle his romance with a former flame, while the two teenagers begin a romance.

Ace cinematographer Harry Stradling Sr (Suspicion, A Streetcar Named Desire, My Fair Lady, Funny Girl) gives the drama a sweeping visual grandeur thanks to his magical eye for composition. The performances are very effective too, but the film is best remembered for Max Steiner’s sterling soundtrack and his chart-topping Theme from A Summer Place, which perfectly complement the sultry summer night scenes. Percy Faith’s version went to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1960, remaining there for nine weeks. Steiner won a Golden Laurel for Top Score.

Also in the cast are Beulah Bondi, Jack Richardson, Martin Eric, Ann Doran, Gertrude Flynn, Richard Deacon, Howard Hoffman, Arthur Space, Roberta Shore, Nancy Matthews, Helen Wallace, Eleanor Audley, Peter Constanti and Phil Chambers.

Donahue used his real name of Merle Johnson for his character in The Godfather: Part II (1974). He was given the name of Troy Donahue by Hollywood press agent Henry Willson, the same man who renamed Roy Scherer as Rock Hudson. Donahue died on September 2 2001 and Dorothy McGuire who plays his mother died 11 days later.

Though set on an island off Maine, it was filmed in California near Carmel, where Donohue was mobbed by fans. The house where Ken and Sylvia live at the end of the film is a private residence built by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1948 on Scenic Road in Carmel-by-the-Sea.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3382

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