A Summer Place (1959)
Richard Egan, Dorothy McGuire, Sandra Dee, Troy Donahue, Arthur Kennedy, Constance Ford and Beulah Bondi
Director – Delmer Daves
From Warner Bros.
This romantic drama tells the story of a self-made millionaire, Ken Jorgenson (Egan), who takes his family, including daughter, Molly (Dee), back to Pine Island, Maine, the summer place where he used to work. Owners and operators of the Pine Island Inn include Ken’s old flame, her drunkard of a husband and their son, Johnny (Donahue). Ken and Dorothy (McGuire) renew their ardour and eventually Molly and Johnny begin a relationship. These scandalous goings-on result in secret trysts, divorces and other intense family affairs.
I was in my early teens when I stumbled upon A Summer Place, being introduced to it in a roundabout way. In my second-favourite film of all-time, 1982’s Diner, the gang goes to see this movie in the theatre. There are scenes from A Summer Place in Diner and one of the characters mentions that Troy Donahue is gorgeous and the novel the movie was based on was written by the man who wrote The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit. Beth was right.
Sloan Wilson (1920-2003) was a novelist from Connecticut who did, indeed, write both of these notable and successful books, both made into quite iconic films. Despite bearing one of the coolest names I’ve ever heard, poor Sloan spent his life a drunkard and suffered from Alzheimer’s before he passed at 83 in Virginia. I am the proud owner of both of Wilson’s popular books. Somehow, I don’t remember, I found a great movie tie-in paperback of A Summer Place and a hardcover first edition of Grey Flannel Suit. These are two of the many books I own that I need to re-read someday.
Screenwriter (and producer/director) Delmer Daves has crafted a compelling and dramatic screen story out of the novel. Wilson had written a screenplay encompassing the 20 years that the novel deals with but Daves condensed it down to twelve months. The cast is excellent. All of them – almost all of them – do well delivering some excellent lines and embodying some fascinating characters. And the scenarios here are not only legitimately bold for 1959 but still retain a watchability even in light of today’s moral decay. The depictions are not dated and the way the issues are discussed and handled could still be considered relevant.
Right off the bat we are introduced to two distinct characters well portrayed. I love big, strapping Richard Egan from seeing only two of his over fifty movies; this one and Love Me Tender. In the opening scenes on the yacht he looks great in his sweater and white bucks. His dynamic with his wife is established early. I loathe Constance Ford – but simply because she absolutely nails her portrayal of frigid, bigoted, conniving, manipulative Mrs. Helen Jorgenson. If this is a soap opera, this is a quintessential soap opera character. Watch how she stands ramrod straight as she issues orders to her family; Ken must dress like a yachtsman and Molly like a androgynous minor. Ken bristles, saying he won’t “put on any dog” and chastises his wife for trying to de-sex Molly. To boot, he chucks clothes he refuses to wear right out the porthole and into the sound.
The Hunters are no less fascinating. Egan’s opposite number is the incredible Arthur Kennedy. Early in my years of immersing myself in film, I saw Kennedy in this film and in another “place” movie, Peyton Place, another scandalous-type movie released two years before our film. Kennedy’s Bart is a hopeless drunk, he’s obnoxious and plain-speaking and simply a joy to watch, glass in hand and ascot neatly in place. Dorothy McGuire – while not ravishing – is loaded with class and acquits herself well. I feel I must love Troy Donahue and I do – kinda. He – much like Sandra Dee – is an icon of this era. He is representative of this time that I love so well. But…dang, dude is just not a good actor. He is cursed with that deadly dull tone of voice, an affliction even Olivier would be hard-pressed to mask. A cool dude like Keanu Reeves is also cursed with this but makes up for it in so many ways but Troy simply doesn’t have the chops to overcome this and the viewer can’t get past it. He may have been a bit more animated in, say, Palm Springs Weekend but when he is tasked with playing it in earnest like he is here, it just doesn’t come off. And does he make up for all this with devastating good looks? He does not. But no matter.
Bart Hunter – the inn, his family’s legacy, facing Chapter 11 – resents Ken and his family coming here to lord their wealth over him so he is bent on destruction. He is uncanny and has Helen Jorgenson down cold. Somehow, he discerns her snootiness and her frigidity and he sets out to batter her. The first night, the two families sit down to dinner and Bart unsettles Helen by describing Pine Island as a “perverted garden of Eden where the pines and the salt air seem to act as an APHRODISIAC!” When Mrs. Jorgenson becomes rattled and breaks a glass, Bart reassures her; “that was the last of the family crystal anyway”. Legend. Later he continues to club her, asking her if she ever swims “in the raw”.
Sandra Dee turned 17 the day before production on this film wrapped. At 16 – Donahue was 23, BTW – Dee puts in an excellent performance and hits all the right notes. After having just met Johnny, while walking in the rose garden, she kisses him and explains how she got so good at it. She bluntly describes the afternoon hours she spent on the roof of her high school learning to kiss with a boy. Was he her steady? Nope, he was the class president, a senior, we can assume, while she was a sophomore. They kept doing it until she got it right.
Mrs. Jorgenson has spied Molly letting Johnny kiss her. She basically labels her daughter a harlot and tells Ken it’s down to his Swedish blood. Here, Egan delivers a monologue for the ages as he attacks Helen and her prejudices. The speech apparently drew a standing ovation at a showing at Radio City Music Hall. Undeterred, Helen reads her daughter the riot act, telling her that Molly wanting a man is wrong. Molly goes in to say goodnight to her father and the two share a tender moment, Molly asking her dad why he ever married Helen. Dad reveals Mom has never told him that she loves him.
Beulah Bondi is good in this; this is the first movie – with It’s a Wonderful Life, I guess – that I ever saw her in. Talking to Sylvia about Bart disparagingly, she has a couple of good lines. She says Bart tries to “make a virtue out of incompetence” and calls himself “one of God’s helpless people”. And Bondi as Aunt Emily counsels Sylvia and pulls no punches, talking bluntly – and is not shy about asking Ken – a guest – if he can fix the leak in the roof. He’s game, though, our boy Ken and he gets changed saying he’s not a man of leisure anyways. Up in the attic alone with Sylvia they finally have a chance to talk. Sylvia asks him why he came back – “I came back because I had to” he says, earnestly. Ken asks her if Bart knew they had been lovers when he married her. Interestingly, Sylvia says yes – “he knew that on our wedding night”, knew that Sylvia wasn’t a virgin, and Bart has been half in the bag ever since. The payoff finally comes when Ken says huskily “do you love me? Is it still the same?” and – in fine soap opera fashion – Sylvia responds “dear God, yes!!”. And we’re off.
I’ve said before that a story like this has to be set up properly. In my review of Silent Night, Lonely Night, I talked about that story’s author, playwright Robert Anderson, and his other notable work, Tea and Sympathy. In those two tales, Anderson does a good job of “allowing” two people who are married to others to be intimate. Adultery is not to be taken lightly, especially on-screen in a studio film of the golden era, and so the pretext has to be sound. In the case of Sloan Wilson and A Summer Place, the audience can sympathize with both principals as they have both been living “half-life’s” and are trapped in marriages that have atrophied. Helen has already been painted as repulsive and Bart may be good with a zinger but he’s a drunk who has given up on life. So, the audience is free to understand and accept the affair between Ken and Sylvia. The pairing is even depicted as pre-ordained and they are two people who should be together. The lovers then plan where and how they can carry out their affair. Sylvia says to Ken “I’m perfectly willing to come to you whenever you want me” – what every man wants to hear!
Molly and Johnny go sailing and encounter some rough seas. Their little sailboat wrecks and they spend a night on an island offshore. When the Coast Guard returns the kids home, a guest at the inn tells Mrs. Jorgensen not to worry, Johnny and Molly are back, safe and sound. But it is immediately apparent that Helen Jorgenson is not concerned with their physical well being – well, she is very concerned about one specific part of Molly’s…well being. The scenes when Mrs. Jorgenson sends for the doctor are blood-curdling. Dee plays it well and Helen reveals herself to be wholly reprehensible. See, Mama makes assumptions and makes it clear that she cannot trust the word of her daughter and will only accept the result of the doctor’s examination. Afterwards, Molly tells Johnny she can no longer see him. She says that her mother told her that Ken and Sylvia are having an affair. Rotten Mrs. Jorgenson hopes to deflect from the wrong she may have done by telling Molly that her father is a philanderer. Helen confronts Johnny and Molly and Johnny – in his rage – threatens to kill Mrs. Jorgenson, something she delights in hearing as it can be used against Johnny at a later date. The fact that this has happened in Ken’s absence has left Molly without an ally and when Ken returns he becomes livid at his wife. But the jig is up and his affair with Sylvia is outed. There is a significant moment when both Bart and Ken are looking at Helen with looks of hatred and disgust. A bomb has gone off at this once tranquil summer place.
I like watching this film in September. It could easily be taken for a summer movie but really it takes place over the course of about a full year – there is even a scene at Christmas. But I like that it traverses from summer holidays and into the school year and it gets my imagination going; boy and girl meet over the summer and try to stay in touch though their schools are far apart – Johnny’s in Virginia and Molly’s in Buffalo.
There’s even a spring break. Ken and Sylvia have married – at the previous site of the First United Methodist Church on Lighthouse Avenue in Pacific Grove, California – and both parents invite their children to spend two weeks together at a house Ken has bought “at the sound”. This house is the stunning Mrs. Clinton Walker Residence at 26336 Scenic Road, Carmel-by-the-Sea. Sylvia notes that the house was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and she is correct. Wright designed it and the house was completed in 1952. It stands today and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1977. Additional scenes were filmed at a cottage at the Mission Ranch, another location in Carmel that is owned by my man Clint Eastwood who rescued it from a condominium development in 1986.
At this point, I probably should also mention the lovely summer place itself, the Pine Island Inn. The LaPorte Mansion in Pacific Grove was built in the 1890s by a businessman who wanted to move there from Santa Cruz because the roads in that town were lousy. Sadly, internet searches for info on the mansion result only in news stories of the fire that devastated the place in the spring of 2023. I read that it and many homes of the time were constructed using “balloon-framed construction, where the exterior of the structure is built first and the walls are added inside…It creates a space between the exterior walls and interior walls from the ground up to the attic. Once a fire gets inside that space, it travels straight up and overtakes the attic”. Eventually, in August of 2023, the mansion was torn down. Nothing is on the lot today.
Anyways, while on spring break with Ken and Sylvia, Johnny and Molly steal off together. He gets revved up, she tells him they have to be good. But that night they lie about going to the movies and instead they go to a secret spot where they can be alone. Here, Johnny pumps the brakes saying that there is no sense in kissing Molly if he has to stop and be good. But Molly flips the script and promotes their coupling. It is handled like you would expect in a Fifties movie but we are to assume they are intimate.
While waiting for the kids to get home, Ken and Sylvia have a significant conversation that would have proven educational to audiences of the time and is still relevant today. Sylvia suggests they talk to the kids and tell them to take it slow. Ken gently scoffs saying he and Sylvia certainly didn’t take it slow when they were the kids’ age and he struggles to come up with something to tell Molly without sounding like a hypocrite. She shouldn’t be frigid like her mother but she shouldn’t give herself away too freely either. One reckless night can ruin her life. So, what then? Make out in the back seat but always stop short? Always control yourself before you go too far? That ain’t easy. Sensible woman Sylvia offers that love is what really matters after the passion is spent and hopefully Johnny and Molly have that as a foundation.
Speaking of spent passion, we cut to Molly at a doctor’s office and Johnny on the phone asking her if she’s sure. Whoops. Johnny hitchhikes to Molly in Buffalo so they can figure out what to do. Johnny says they will get married and I always chuckle when Molly says “Papa would kill me and Mama would die”. Pretty bold storyline, actually. Here it is 1959 and two unwed teenage kids are “in trouble”. My dad is broadminded, Johnny tells Molly, he’ll give us his blessing. The kids return to the inn at Pine Island – a discordant version of Max Steiner’s beloved theme plays as we see the place abandoned and in disrepair. Bart is by now a full-blown dying alcoholic but he is still not ready to sign off on Johnny and Molly being together. He makes some good points about young people being free to have fun and not getting tied down too early but Molly counters by saying that they are in love. No justice of the peace will marry them so the young lovers decide to go to Ken and Sylvia and face the music – figuring nothing bad could ever happen in the beautiful Walker residence by the sea.
Ken’s got his white bucks on and Molly runs to him for a hug. Sylvia’s face says it all when Johnny embraces her; “we live in a glass house”, she says, “we’re not throwing any stones”. Ken says the beauty and strength of love – and a sense of humour – are the weapons of the angels and with these tools the four of them will figure it out. Johnny and Molly marry and honeymoon on Pine Island where they plan to make their lives.
Understand that A Summer Place is a “romantic drama” film that is pretty close to a soap opera. But this in no way detracts from its qualities which are apparent, first and most easily seen, in the performances. Richard Egan is substantial in many ways and he plays Ken Jorgenson with a practicality, an acceptance of life and a simple, direct, even jaunty way about him. You could drive a truck into his chest and he wouldn’t feel it. Sandra Dee, though young, knows how to play Molly and does so well. She nails her childlike aspects and displays well her growing wanton streak. I’ve already mentioned how Constance Ford must be a great actress because I hate Helen so and Arthur Kennedy is a fine craftsman and a sometimes charismatic, sometimes chilling drunk. Playing drunk believably is not easy and Kennedy is excellent at it. Though I will say that I saw him much later playing a drunk opposite Burt Reynolds in Shark and all the subtly was gone. Troy Donahue? My daddy always taught me if you don’t have anything nice to say…
Photographed in gorgeous 1950s Technicolor, A Summer Place is many things. Lovely to have the book to explore, as well, and the film boasts a great cast and some wonderful locations. Max Steiner’s instrumental music includes one of the finest movie themes of the Fifties and Canadian Percy Faith’s Number One record of it is renowned. It topped the charts for nine consecutive weeks, a record that would not be broken until 1977 by Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life”. The story has many talking points and the viewer eagerly awaits the next scene to see what will happen. There are heroes and villains and two young kids trying to find their way. The storyline was bold for the time and its universal and timeless themes make the film watchable even today. Its a charming time capsule and an endlessly engaging movie.
Further Reading
- UPDATED: Pacific Grove’s 128-year-old LaPorte Mansion burns in morning fire. Monterey County Now – Pam Marino (May 26, 2023)
- Famous California Central Coast mansion to be demolished. SFGate – Katie Dowd (July 23, 2023)
SoulRide 