Better In Your Head?--A SUMMER PLACE

 

Spoiler Alert: people who live in glass houses should consider relocation.

THE BOOK-Written by Sloan Wilson, released 1958

THE MOVIE-Directed & written by Delmer Daves, released 1959

THE STORY-Summer love on an island resort. The fortunes change, but the feelings do not. 

MIND THE GAP-Sloan Wilson saw the Fifties out with a pair of bestsellers: The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and A Summer Place. Both received the big-screen treatment.* And who remembers any of it? The lasting legacy of ASP is one of those songs people recognize but can't name and a campy GIF relevant one month out of the year. 

Step-siblings falling in love isn't somehow less creepy if they first met as teenagers. 

Percy Faith's version of "Theme From 'A Summer Place'" topped the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 for nine weeks in 1960. This tidbit bisects my mind thus: 

                          Fine song, thin blue and thick green handsomely strung along the earth's curves.

/

                                      The Beatles couldn't crash these shores fast enough.

Squares caught up in the circle import unintended wisdom. Keeping up appearances means keeping down morale. The spouses of Ken and Sylvia are representatives of the hardcore repression scene, misery merchants struggling to reconcile fate's fickle fists, kept alive by a durable shame and an adamantine confidence in the rightness of their opinions. Rebellion is parallel to Hell, per these scornful, sanctimonious hypocrites, and they've the gall to play appalled whenever someone torpedoes their meticulously constructed futures. Ken and Sylvia, and by extension their children, represent the new wave, progress in hot pants, proponents of love over logic. 

It's all really very admirable, but I didn't walk away convinced by these forbidden love connections. I didn't really sense the, um, love. Sloan Wilson sold me on the abstract, but the concrete needed a lot more time to harden.

The movie sold me Snakes In A Can. Richard Egan's perma-grimace is intended to convey Ken's internal turmoil, I guess? Arthur Kennedy fumbles the dream role of cynical drunken dandy despite a big speech about how all the men in his family are cursed from crib to casket. The wives, played by Dorothy McGuire and Constance Ford, are ready for someone else's close-up. The young lovers are a mess. Sandra Dee puts the "act" in "actually unwatchable", while Troy Donahue is just a drab pork chop of a man. Oh, I know, the kids back then all swooned at the sight of their idols locking lips, but I rolled my eyes so many times they eventually changed color.

BETTER IN YOUR HEAD-The filmmakers hit all the obvious attractions, but passed up a wealth of worthy stops: boat mishaps, tormented school chums, deadly falls, frenzied canines, timely motorists, teenage poetry, fights in the snow with wrench-wielding husbands. Wilson's sordid saga deserved better than a one-note melodrama punctuated by performances perfect for an educational short film on the evils of shoplifting.

*The film rights for A Summer Place went for $500K--that's $4.9 million in 2022 money.