A Summer Place (1959)
Based on the 1958 bestselling novel by Sloan Wilson (whose earlier novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit was also a 1950s book and movie milestone), A Summer Place is both bad and momentous, bathetic and unintentionally camp in its melodrama yet rending in its bold dramatization of the agony of postwar American sexual and moral confusion. It is at once a teenage exploitation film, a gothic horror (in which the haunting is that of sexual hypocrisy), and an at times almost clinical attempt at an educational documentary for parents that might be titled “How to Talk to Your Teenager About Sex When You Didn’t Wait Until Marriage Yourself.”
Years before the movie begins, Richard Egan’s Ken and Dorothy McGuire’s Sylvia had been teenaged lovers on Pine Island, a tony little collection of mansions owned by wealthy bluebloods, off the coast of Maine. They were in love, consummated in premarital sex, but class differences prevented their marrying, as McGuire was a daughter of the one of the island families and Egan was a mere summer season lifeguard.
When they meet again at the film’s start, each of them is unhappily married to an awful spouse, each staying in the marriage only out of concern for a teenaged child. McGuire’s son is played by Troy Donahue, and Egan’s daughter by Sandra Dee. Egan is now wealthy, a self-made man, and his wife insists they spend their summer vacation at Pine Island, where McGuire’s alcoholic husband is desperate to find paying guests for his decaying family mansion-turned-hotel.
Egan and McGuire find they are still in love; an affair ensues, they are discovered, they divorce their spouses and marry each other. That same summer, their teenaged offspring fall in love with each other, a tender romance first soured by their resentment of their parents’ affair and divorce, then thwarted by the machinations of Egan’s ex-wife, and finally complicated by a pregnancy. The thrust of the movie is a dual-generation search for a sexual morality that has long since collapsed, like the leaky roof of the ancestral mansion.
Egan’s wife and Dee’s mother is a movie monster for the ages, played by Constance Ford and constantly looking as if she can taste her own vomit. She is a pretentious ball of suspicion who hates everything and everyone. We learn that her hostile prejudices comprise Jews, Catholics, Negroes, Poles, Italians, Orientals, the British, the French, the Russians, the Germans, anyone from Latin America—and she resents her husband’s “Swedish blood.”
But that’s not even her main flaw. Her real villainy is her hatred of all things sexual, passional, loving. She and Egan sleep in separate rooms. She perches like a censorious vulture over her teenaged daughter, leading Egan to berate her: “Must you label young lovemaking as cheap, and wanton, and indecent? Must you persist in making sex itself a filthy word?” Dee complains to her father: “She makes me ashamed of even having a body!”
In the most shocking scene of the movie, Dee returns from an innocent excursion with Donahue to find that her mother has summoned a stern, male doctor from the mainland to perform a vaginal examination on her and see if her virginity is intact. Dee screams in horror as the doctor steps towards her, ending the scene.
The other awful ex is not quite as bad, though this is a low bar. Arthur Kennedy plays Donahue’s father and McGuire’s first husband, a lazy and jaded snob who always has a highball in hand. If Dee’s mother represents a neurotically anti-sexual, repressive Puritanism as one response to present-day social arrangements, Donahue’s father represents a different response: one of cynical hypocrisy, a de-idealizing acceptance of sexual immorality so long as it is dulled with alcohol and kept more or less out of the papers.
He lecherously asks Donahue for details of what he assumes is his son’s sexual conquest of Dee, and says of women “They’re all alike in the dark.” He speaks the language of mid-century psychoanalysis—“subconsciously” is a favorite adverb—and in his final scene he is wearing his old coast guard uniform to indicate his position as part of the not-so-Greatest generation.
What are the alternatives to the stances represented by Ford’s anti-sexuality on the one hand, and Kennedy’s louche and furtive sexuality on the other? This is what the divorcing and remarrying couple, Egan and McGuire, are trying to figure out—for themselves but even more for their children on the cusp of adulthood.
From the beginning, Egan struggles to defend his daughter against her mother’s infliction of guilt and loathing. “She says I bounce when I walk,” Dee unhappily asks her dad. “Do I, do I?” He responds: “In a pleasant and unobjectionable way.” Later, he tells Ford that their daughter “has a lovely, healthy figure. Why do you try to destroy it?” His great lesson for his daughter, over the objections of her mother, is this: “we’ve got only one great reason for living. To love and be loved. That’s our sole reason for existence.”
Yet the movie acknowledges that “To love and be loved” may not entirely suffice as a guide to sexual morality. In a speech drawn from Wilson’s novel, Egan wrestles with how to counsel his daughter when she is out with Donahue. He wants to affirm her youth, her healthy instincts, her emotional life—but how far and with what consequences? Expressing his confusion to McGuire, he asks what their advice as parents—who had premarital sex themselves and left their marriages—should be:
Kiss a little, but not too much? Don’t let Johnny make love to you, but don’t be angry if he tries? . . . Just what honest advice can I give her? To be a half-virgin? To allow herself to be fondled? To go half way in the back seats of parked cars, but always draw back in time? . . . But I can’t tell her to enjoy passion either? To take joy in the giving of it, because that would destroy her? I can’t tell her to be half good, I’d feel like a hypocrite.
Dee and Donahue are wrestling more directly with these questions. Deeply in love, they do not have an available and authoritative model for how to express that love. “Are you bad, Johnny?” Dee asks Donahue early on. “Have you been bad with girls?” “No,” he says. “I just don’t know exactly what that word ‘good’ means.” At another point he imagines a Margaret Mead influenced utopia outside of modern civilization—and adult sexuality—as the only possible solution. “You know,” he tells Dee, “I wish we lived on one of those South Sea islands where everyone gets married when they’re twelve.” “I wouldn’t have been ready for you then, Johnny,” she responds. “I was real goony at twelve. And you wouldn’t have wanted me.”
In any case, they finally decide to have sex. (They tell their parents that they are out seeing the movie King Kong—both novel and movie linger on the symbolism of that story of a rampaging beast doomed by his love for a vulnerable blonde.) Dee discovers she is pregnant, and the two teens attempt to get married secretly by a justice of the peace, but are exposed as being underage.
They return to Egan and McGuire, a conclusion in which the teens will forgive and accept their parents’ infidelity and divorce, and the parents will accept their children’s premarital sexual activity and pregnancy. “You got a fight ahead of you kids,” says Egan. “But you’ve got the beauty and strength of love on your side. And if we can find a sense of humor too, these are the weapons of the angels.”
Warner Brothers bought the movie rights to the novel for the equivalent today of over five million dollars. The film is remembered now mainly for the iconic orchestral theme composed by Max Steiner, a number one hit in its recording by Percy Faith. The theme’s strangely yearning placidity belies the familial wreckage and social crisis portrayed in the movie.
Similarly, as someone who had never seen Dee in a movie (not even Gidget), I was surprised at how this movie is the exact opposite of those lyrics from Grease:
Look at me, I’m Sandra Dee,
Lousy with virginity.
Won’t go to bed ‘til I’m legally wed:
I can’t, I’m Sandra Dee.
In A Summer Place, Dee does indeed go to bed before being wed. Moreover, although Donahue is a non-entity acting-wise, Dee’s performance is strangely haunting. She is not a sexpot or a teenybopper but a lost girl with wounded eyes, perhaps an echo of the real-life sexual abuse the actress suffered as a child.
I have been saying that in terms of social and sexual arrangements the 1950s are already the 1960s, theoretically if not in practice. If A Summer Place begs comparison with another film, it is The Graduate (1967). Both movies make a younger couple pay for their parents’ moral hollowness and sexual hypocrisy. Both register the protest and pain of a younger generation unable to find meaning in the institutions of America.
In one scene, Donahue’s teacher chastises him for not concentrating on his schoolwork. If there is another war—and he assumes there will be—doesn’t he want to be an officer? “I don’t even know where I’m going, let alone leading somebody else,” answers Donahue, and the rest of the class breaks into applause. This is already The Graduate’s Benjamin Braddock, “playing some kind of game, but the rules don’t make any sense to me.”
Granted, A Summer Place does not go as far as the later film. It leaves the younger couple mostly innocent, while The Graduate follows through on the intergenerational sexual implications of the earlier movie. A Summer Place pulls back from the nihilistic edge, with a happy ending and a proper marriage announced between Donahue and Dee, in contrast to Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross on a bus, staring into space.
Yet A Summer Place articulates questions it cannot answer and that remain unanswered a decade later. Contraception would resolve the earlier plot’s technical challenges, but not its moral despair. And so, in some ways, the earlier, cheesy movie is more affecting, is more painfully awkward beneath its weird preachiness, is as broken and pleading as Sandra Dee’s animal eyes.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
Is the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers a divorce movie? Well, I wouldn’t go that far, though it is a movie set in a California awash in psychoanalysts, about people who wake up one morning to find that their loved ones have become emotionally unavailable.
The movie’s two leads, Dr. Miles Bennell and Becky Driscoll (Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter), are both newly divorced, and neither is accompanied in the film by an ex-spouse to reunite with or be hung up on. “I guess that makes us lodge brothers now,” says Miles to Becky, on learning she has just returned from Reno, “except that I’m paying dues while you collect them.”
In the novel on which the movie is based, The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney, Miles explains the advantage of two recently divorced people spending time together:
It was wonderful to be free, but just the same, the breakup of something that wasn’t intended to work out that way leaves you a little shaken, and not too sure of yourself, and I knew I was lucky to have run into Becky. Because we’d each been through the same mill, and it meant I had a woman to go out with on a nice even keel, with none of the unspoken pressures and demands that gradually accumulate between a man and a woman, ordinarily. With anyone else, I knew we’d have been building toward some sort of inevitable climax: marriage, or an affair, or a bust-up. But Becky was just what the doctor ordered.
As in the novel, the film’s Miles and Becky learn that their family, friends, and neighbors are being replaced by emotionless lookalikes. “You can’t love or be loved!” Miles accuses the Pod People. One responds, “You say it as if it were terrible. Believe me, it isn’t. You’ve been in love before. It didn’t last. It never does.”
In addition to the usual attributions of anti-Communist hysteria to the movie, we might want to include unease about marriage and divorce as part of the movie’s social context. Rather than giving up and joining the placid blob of Pod People—the ultimate polycule—Becky proclaims to Miles: “I want to love and be loved. I want your children. I don’t want a world without love or grief or beauty. I’d rather die.”
Recall that this is precisely the father’s message to Sandra Dee in A Summer Place: “we’ve got only one great reason for living. To love and be loved. That’s our sole reason for existence.” “To Love And Be Loved” was even the title of a song by Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen sung at the time by Frank Sinatra, a decade before the Beatles claimed that love is all you need.
Man on Fire (1957)
Like the previous year’s Teenage Rebel, this is another black and white drama about child custody battles, with a musical star in the lead. In fact, Man on Fire might even be seen as Teenage Rebel from the standpoint of the emotionally insecure and embittered ex-husband, played here by Bing Crosby in what critics noted was a daringly unsympathetic role.
Because of its change of focus, this movie is not as groundbreaking as Teenage Rebel, though there is a similar insistence that the teenaged child of the divorced parents work to accept custody arrangements. But the teen in question (played well by Malcolm Brodrick) really does his best as he is yanked in contrary directions like a yo-yo.
The obstacle to an amicable arrangement here is Bing, who plays a selfish and emotionally stunted jerk who at one point tries to kidnap his son rather than surrender full custody. He comes around at the end through the love of a good, much younger woman, played by the pretty Inger Stevens (she reminds me of Mira Sorvino), though it is entirely unclear why she fancies this grump.
The Swedish-born Stevens overcame a tumultuous childhood to train at the Actors Studio and achieve recognition as an actress, before dying of a barbiturate overdose at the age of 35. After her death it was learned that she had been married to African American film producer Ike Jones, which both kept secret out of concern for their careers.