Summertime [Summer Madness] ***** (1955, Katharine Hepburn, Rossano Brazzi, Isa Miranda, Darren McGavin, Mari Aldon, André Morell, Jeremy Spenser) – Classic Movie Review 679

Director David Lean’s 1955 exquisite masterwork is a gloriously unashamed, full-throttled romance, in which Katharine Hepburn plays Jane Hudson, a visiting American spinster who enjoys a summer of chaste love with an old Italian smoothie called Renato de Rossi (played by Rossano Brazzi from South Pacific) in Italy’s quintessential tourist trap, Venice.

A feisty, attractive middle-aged secretary from Akron, Ohio, Jane has got her camera ready for her long-awaited dream vacation. She likes to feel free and independent, but at an outdoor café in the Piazza San Marco, Jane catches the eye of a handsome antiques-shop owner named Renato de Rossi.

Based on the 1952 Broadway play The Time of the Cuckoo by Arthur Laurents (it starred Shirley Booth), this material is as light as a feather and potentially static and stagey. But as director and co-screenwriter with delicate novelist H E Bates, David Lean, the maker of another famous Brief Encounter, is just the man to turn it into the purest cinematic gold.

The charming Hepburn subtly and perfectly judges her bitter-sweet performance and Brazzi makes a perfectly handsome obscure object of desire for her and ideal foil for her performance. The canal city has hardly ever looked more beguiling (except perhaps in the dead of winter in Don’t Look Now, in Visconti’s Death in Venice or The Comfort of Strangers) thanks to director of photography Jack Hildyard’s spectacular cinematography. Summertime, Don’t Look Now, Death in Venice and The Comfort of Strangers are the four great, essential Venice movies, a mixed bag, certainly, but all must see movies.

‘David is sweet and strong and savage, and he is the best movie director in the world,’ said Hepburn.

Hepburn suffered for her art: she had severe eye damage from her spill in the stagnant canal (in a famous, remarkable shot without use of a double) and the stench from the waters aggravated ailments left over from her earlier film The African Queen. The infection in one of her eyes stayed with her the rest of her life. These were the bad old days when the canals were dirty and smelled bad.

Hepburn’s apartment in the film is a mix of three different locations. The front door belongs to the Trattoria Sempione, a restaurant that still exists, her bedroom belongs to an apartment two miles away in the suburb of Dursoduro, and the terrace was a purpose-built set in Compo San Vio.

Despite being set in summer, some of the scenes were obviously shot in winter. The Venice clock tower shows wooden statues of the Three Wise Men, a holiday season sight.

Curiously, Jane Hudson is also the name of the former child star in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), played by Bette Davis. What’s going on there?

Lean said filming on location in Venice was expensive because he had to pay off local merchants whose customers were supposedly scared off by the camera equipment and crew. Yet the number of tourists traveling to Venice doubled after the film’s release. Did Lean ask for his money back? Probably not.

Also in the cast are Isa Miranda, Darren McGavin, Mari Aldon, André Morell, Jeremy Spenser, Jane Rose, MacDonald Parke, Gaetano Autiero and Virginia Simeon.

Laurents later adapted his story as a Broadway musical called Do I Hear A Waltz with songs by Richard Rodgers and Stephen Sondheim.

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© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Film Review 679 derekwinnert.com

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