{"id":28826,"date":"2023-07-26T07:37:39","date_gmt":"2023-07-26T06:37:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=28826"},"modified":"2023-07-26T19:27:11","modified_gmt":"2023-07-26T18:27:11","slug":"a-review-of-the-david-lean-film-that-youve-never-heard-of-summertime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=28826","title":{"rendered":"A review of the David Lean film that you&#8217;ve never heard of: &#8220;Summertime&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"\nIn 1955, just two years before acclaimed British director David Lean began turning out a series of hugely successful epic movies, he made &#8220;Summertime&#8221;, a small romantic comedy-drama shot entirely in the glorious city of Venice. In spite of being a massive Lean fan since &#8220;Lawrence Of Arabia&#8221; (1962) and visiting Venice three times, I had never heard of this film until 2023 when the British Film Institute screened a restoration, with an introduction by Lean biographer Kevin Brownlow, as part of its seniors&#8217; free matinee offering. It was a delight to see.\n<p>\nBased on the 1952 play &#8220;The Time Of The Cuckoo&#8221; by Arthur Laurentis, it was scripted by Lean himself and the novelist H E Bates. It tells the story of Jane Hudson (the wonderful Katherine Hepburn), a lonely, spinsterish American who travels to Venice for a vacation and falls in love with both the city and one of its inhabitants (the charming Rossano Brazzi). Hepburn is splendid at portraying Janes&#8217;s initial aching loneliness and subsequent playfulness, but the motivation for Jane&#8217;s final decision is never made clear.\n<p>In his biography of Lean, Brownlow writes: <I>&#8220;&#8216;Summertime&#8217;, or &#8216;Summer Madness&#8217; as it was called in Britain, was David&#8217;s favourite film, starring his favourite actress. It was made in Venice, one of his favourite places in the world. As he told a friend: &#8216;I&#8217;ve put more of myself in that film than any other I&#8217;ve ever made.'&#8221;<\/I>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In 1955, just two years before acclaimed British director David Lean began turning out a series of hugely successful epic movies, he made &#8220;Summertime&#8221;, a small romantic comedy-drama shot entirely in the glorious city of Venice. In spite of being a massive Lean fan since &#8220;Lawrence Of Arabia&#8221; (1962) and visiting Venice three times, I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cultural-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28826"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28826\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28830,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28826\/revisions\/28830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}