Summertime

Summertime – David Lean made this film in 1955. It stars Katherine Hepburn as a lonely spinster who visits Venice and falls in love with a married antique shop-owner. Lean’s philandering led him to adultery stories and the film is well-acted but inferior in every respect to Brief Encounter, his 1945 melodrama on a similar subject. Rossano Brazzi plays Hepburn’s love-interest, an unintelligible, if handsome, cipher in the film and there are intriguing smaller roles, including a part for Darren acGavin as a dissolute American painter – the smaller parts are far more compelling than the main characters and, after a half hour, one longs to see more of the supporting players. But it is not to be. The picture focuses resolutely on Hepburn and she courageously dithers and hesitates, daring, I suppose, to play the part of a woman who is annoying, probably alcoholic, and relentlessly crazy in a dull, irritating kind of way. The film is spectacularly shot in Technicolor and the images of Venice are, at once, grubby and magnificent – you can almost smell the place and the sound track, which has the curious effect of voices echoing over stagnant water, is wonderfully evocative. But the picture is dull, poorly written, and completely inconsequential – it is, indeed, surprisingly, bad.