Popular reviews

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  Review by trolleyfreak ★★★★★ 11

  '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'

  Sexual frustration, sexual repression, sexual abandonment, sex, sex, SEX!!! - this is a picture fixated on the subject and presented via the best medium possible: overripe, late '50's Hollywood melodrama!!

  Within a few seconds of the film starting you know what you're in for here: waves crash onto rocks (as a metaphor for tempestuous passion), a boat called 'Randy' sails into view, and a father throws his teenage daughter's underwear overboard!

  This picture has it all - and more! - and there's no room for subtlety whatsoever: on an idyllic island off the coast of Maine a long-suffering wife (McGuire) and her dipsomaniac…

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  Review by miki minach ★★★

  dorothy slapping her daughter(molly)* 
  molly: merry christmas mamá
  dorothy: as your always said you are your fathers daughter.
  but seriously did she need to take the whole christmas tree with her, though?!

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  Review by Josh Gillam ★★½

  Richard Egan, Sandra Dee, Troy Donahue and Dorothy Maguire star in this romantic drama from Delmer Daves focusing on two different parallel romances: a self made businessman starting up a relationship with the woman he’d loved years before, and their respective teenage children who themselves fall for one another, each relationship having an impact on the other.

  A Summer Place is strange in that it starts out a far more interesting and dynamic film than it ultimately becomes; the first half is great, building a potent slow-burning love story that focuses on two middle-aged people rekindling their decades old love after years apart. This is played with a passion and intimacy by Egan and Maguire that brings it to life…

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  Review by Hamza Khan ★★

  The theme music of this movie is amazing - a beautiful and soothing melody that brings peace to the heart.

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  Review by theironcupcake ★★★★½ 3

  "We live in a glass house - we're not throwing any stones."

  Yesterday I suggested that A Summer Place was my preferred mode of Delmer Daves film when compared to Destination Tokyo, and upon revisiting the later melodrama, I'm doubling down on my opinion.

  There is always going to be one particular reason: Sandra Dee.

  Even now, a decade and a half after her death, Dee's cultural legacy continues to be her image as Gidget, the bubbly blonde teen mired in sun, surf and chasing cute guys. As the Grease refrain announces so perkily: "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!" I don't know if Jim Jacobs and…

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  Review by comrade_yui ★★★★★ 2

  delmer daves is not a nuanced or sophisticated director, he is very straight-ahead and believes in the naked power of intense emotions being thrown right at the camera -- in a sense this makes his films feel a bit basic at times, but they have their own rules, you have to take them as expressions of bare elemental forces which do not mince words because they are bursting with sharp sincerity.

  a summer place is daves in a very purple mood, said by one of the characters to take place in a 'perverted garden of eden' -- the interpersonal corruption and decadence at this stunning island hotel is evinced by daves' classic crane shots which pan so high as to…

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  Review by sakana1 ★★★½ 24

  In addition to being a truly fascinating historical document of late 1950s morality and what cinematic risk-taking looked like in 1959, A Summer Place also makes an excellent, accidental double bill with 1967's Belle de Jour.

  Whereas in the latter film, social and class rules have been so completely internalized and accepted that everyone acts and speaks according to them (and, when they defy them, suffer accordingly), A Summer Place is built upon examination of those rules — discussions of them, regrets about obeying them and, sometimes, the severe consequences of defiance. (Though of course, heteronormativity is something that's never either discussed or challenged, nor does the film acknowledge the possible existence of anyone whose "sole reason for existing" isn't…

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  Review by noir1946 ★★½ 2

  Here it is, the great American holiday, and what says what it means to be an American more than getting hot, bothered, and confused about sex? “Peggy Sue, you stay away from that Sammy Joe, you hear. You can’t get no abortion no more. And stay away from that Lucinda Mae, too. That gal ain’t natural, if you ask me.”

  As we all know, sex did not exist at the beginning of the 50s. By the end of the decade, however, that sneaky little bastard was trying to raise its head out from under the covers. Delmer Daves’ A Summer Place, despite being a tad overwrought and preachy, as well as very slow, is at least an honest attempt to…

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  Review by N3V3RW00RLD ★★★★★ 1

  Throat slashing melodrama. Victims to their collapsing schemes. But its not all acid spit and drunken self punishment, the small bursts of passion between lovers are so intoxicating and forthright. Love is honest but no one is. Love of any kind must hide in order to express itself, lest be scolded and scorned for having even considered the possibility of feeling love in the first place. "dont you know it doesnt last??" they shout. Something I have to keep in mind is I'm lucky to have felt a love as powerful and as tender and true as I have, because most people have not. Perhaps I'm too young to declare such a thing, however I believe its better to live…

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  Review by Bruno Andrade ★★★★ 2

  “This is the dialectic – there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.” — Douglas Sirk

  
  Tem também aquela frase do Rivette, não lembro dela com exatidão, mas a ideia é que em cada grande filme ronda o perigo do desastre, daquilo dar drasticamente errado.

  Como isso se dá com o Daves? Na maior parte dos seus filmes Daves é esse sujeito que oscila entre Fassbinder (o lado grande filme) e Spielberg (o lado desastre). De um lado um cinema crítico, ao mesmo tempo esquemático e dilacerante, que ataca os preconceitos sentimentais e os impasses de personagens que habitam um universo…

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  Review by Craig Lumley ★★★½

  Scavenge Hunt Hunt 53: Film 16/31 - Watch a movie about teenagers

  I yearn for the days when soapy melodramas where mounted like epics. This is what academics would call "my cup of tea." Gorgeous.

  Despite having an inviting look, a hit score, and starring a teen idol, this a sexually frank psychologically dark film. Each character has some complex attitudes about sex. Sandra Dee is subjected to some hard to watch emotional abuse from her mother, one of the most detestable characters in any film, whose sexual repression/repulsion is linked to her racism/classism.

  Wish more people who grew up with this film understood it's message that being honest with young people about sex is not a bad thing.

  The…

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  Review by single white femalien ★★★★

  so scandalous...