A Summer Place- The Film

Jackée Harry said Constance Ford wasn't a nice person on the set of "Another World", either. It happens at 1:45.

[OP], I think Constance Ford's character of the mom in "Summer Place" spent years hearing how wonderful her husband's first love was along with being jealous to an incestuous degree of her own daughter's beauty. So finally meeting his former girlfriend on vacation and everyone on the island not only truly does "'like her best,"' but it includes that daughter made mom snap like a twig.

She looks like the kind of dyke who'd take a dump on your dressing floor

if you pissed her off

She liked to abuse the young and the pretty ones the most...

She should've been the Warden of a Women's Prison

R2! YES!!!! Awesome- I was thinking that I had to rewatch the film because perhaps I missed some subtext or even one line that gives a clue.

But what you just mentioned sounds perfect to me.

I live in New England and I will tale back one thing. Not all of the scenes looked like Maine. That very modern Art Deco-ish (for the time) church would have never been in Maine in the 50's. That looked very California.

Jackee, gurl...she was just testing your mettle! You need to stand up to her like Miss Victoria Wyndham did.

[quote] So that first day I come in, and I'm doing a scene with Connie, and we finish the scene, and she looks at the director du jour and she says, "Well, Robbie never would have played it like that, is that the way you're gonna play it?" I put my script down and I waited for the director to run interference, and it was clear to me that he was a little intimidated by her, so I put my script down and I said, "When you've all sorted this out, I'll be in my dressing room!" I walked off the set, and that was the end of that -- that was the moment that Connie decided that I was a great replacement for Robin. I'd worked with people like this before. I'd been on Broadway, I'd been off-Broadway. I'd been working with Lily Tomlin and Madeline Kahn and everybody else, so Connie Ford was certainly not going to intimidate me on my first day. Well, that was all she wanted to do; she was testing my mettle and she found out [I wouldn't wilt] and from that point on we got along famously.

Jesus Christ R6. Connie only liked MASCULINE everything. Can you imagine being feminine or wilting around Big Con? Connie probably only fucked other bull dykes. Connie was the BALLS. And probably had a pair underneath her lady slacks)

She sounds MISERABLE. Yet probably awesome if she respected you.

Op. I love this movie. I watched this with my mother when I was a teen gayling (mom HAD to know) because I loved Troy and the campy drama and, yes, the bitch mother. Mom said it was very scandalous when it first came out. Teen sex, extramarital sex, sex even being openly alluded to. Muy Escandalo!!

Yes, the dialogue was hilarious.

"Have you been a bad boy, Johnny?"

Forgot to add, to this day I watch this along with Susan Slade and Peyton Place while visiting mom while we kill a bottle or two of wine.

Excellent, OP. I know this movie only from its torpific theme song, which somehow became the default for everything from elevator music to the "experiencing operating difficulties" interlude on tv stations.

The entire film is ABOUT SEX. Desiring sex. Withholding sex. Being sexy. Not being sexy. Waiting to have sex. Inspecting this bitch to see if she had sex. Pretending not to want sex.

I cannot believe this film was made in 1959.

The movies is all about how for a straight man, having a "frigid" wife is the worst thing that could possibly happen! Yes, back in the day men used to say that women who explored their sexuality at all were worthless sluts, but if a woman who'd kept everything in check until her wedding night didn't immediately love being penetrated then she was "frigid" and there was something wrong with her, and that her husband was the one who deserved pity. Of course nowadays the straights say "There are no frigid women, there are only clumsy men", which makes me feel just a bit sorry for the dad's next wife. And the author's wife or ex-wife.

Of course I think the author of the script was trying to write about the horrors of female frigidity, the horrors for the man who married her anyway, but Constance Ford played the character as more dykey than cold. I always hoped that after the divorce she found herself a nice intelligent gal and forgot everything she'd ever believed about a woman's place in the world, and they spent the sixties happily leading the women's rights and gay rights movements.

[quote] Yet probably awesome if she respected you.

RESPECT? Respect is for PUSSIES!

Jesus Christ. R13- I think I would find Connie Ford HOTTER than any MAN! Would she put on a strap on and degrade me? Let's do this CONRAD!

It's also about fixing that damned drip coming on top of my convenience!

It was a fantasy. Young girls did not talked to their fathers about impure thoughts and kidding boys like that, then our even now. Not believable at all.

[quote]I always hoped that after the divorce she found herself a nice intelligent gal and forgot everything she'd ever believed about a woman's place in the world, and they spent the sixties happily leading the women's rights and gay rights movements.

A Summer Place II: I'm Telling You Now It's Michfest

That music. That theme song. That Troy. Great Americana movie. This brings me back memories of me ex. Still love you T!

Neither Dee nor Donahue could act, so Fred Steiner threw in a crescendo whenever one or the other had a big speech. Makes it easy to watch the movie while you're doing something else.

It drags on a bit long but the dialogue is really funny: "Let's not be bad, Johnny" and Buelah Bondi going on about her "convenience". Dorothy Maguire was a good actress who rarely had a good part, so she does what she can with this trash. The Christmas tree scene never get old.

The theme really captures that era--my mother, no sophisticate, loved it.

I’d like some hot chocolate, Margaret. You ninny head!

^^^^

I should have said Barbara...not Margaret.

I’m so ashamed, I’ll never be able to shut my face on DL again.

This is another movie I need to re-watch.

Troy Donahue was the most unattractive heart throb of that era. I couldn’t believe Suzanne Pleshette married him.

Troy Donahue was the untalented Tab Hunter.

If you really want to see how bad an actor Donahue was, watch My Blood Runs Cold, a B-thriller co-starring the equally inept Joey Heatherton.

Troy Donahue gave the same performance in the same windbreaker jacket in every movie. Terrible. Sandra Dee was at least cute. Arthur Kennedy was great as Troys father. But I don’t think he ever turned in a bad performance.

Donahue was cast in "The Godfather II" as Merle Johnson.

He had no lines but I bet nobody, in their wildest dreams, ever would think they'd see Al Pacino and Troy Donahue together in the same scene.

Francis Coppola had a thing for stunt casting. He cast another "C" List heart throb, George Hamilton, in "The Godfather III".

Richard Egan was a B-list leading man in the 1950s who put in some decent performances in often less than decent films. He was perfect as Dee's Dad. He also appeared in a film noir I like, "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue" - it's a bit like a poor man's "On the Waterfront" but still quite good. Odd, my Mum also had a crush on him.

Donahue was a cypher. How he made it into films I don't know, he couldn't act his way out of a paper bag. He was perfect for stuff like "Surfside 6" but beyond that, one sat there puzzling as to why, with that weak chin, he'd gotten as far as he did.

The odd thing is, he was quite bright and wanted to act from his early years. He just didn't have the juice.

Were Connie and Susan Flannery friends?

r27 Merle Johnson was Troy's birth name.

IT'S fairly shuddersome to think of a typical Radio City Music Hall audience— the orderly, impressionable out - of - towners, the quiet family groups and especially the children—drinking in "A Summer Place." For on the screen Warners' version of the Sloan Wilson novel emerges as one of the most laboriously and garishly sex-scented movies in years. With a tedious bluntness of speech and imagery that few people should accept as adult realism, this raucously sensual drama spells out the clashes and intertwinings of two clans on a New England island. It tells — trumpets, is better—how two nice adolescents are almost crushed by four persons best described as delinquent parents. The whole thing leaves a rancid taste.