A Summer Place

Delmer Daves's film is set on an island off the coast of Maine. Two people who parted twenty years earlier meet again there, both now married to other people; at the same time a relationship begins between their children, Molly, played by Sandra Dee, and Johnny, played by Troy Donahue. The film runs the desire of two generations in parallel, and its actual target is adult hypocrisy. Treating adultery, adolescent sexuality and pregnancy this openly at the end of the fifties made it one of the most argued-over productions of its moment; the melodrama form became the vehicle for subjects the censors would not otherwise pass. Its most durable element is the music. The piece Max Steiner wrote, which is not the film's main theme but the love theme for the young couple, spent nine weeks at number one on the Billboard chart in 1960 in Percy Faith's recording, became the biggest-selling instrumental of the rock era, and was the first instrumental to win the Grammy for Record of the Year. Who it is for: viewers curious about classic Hollywood melodrama and the moral arguments of the period. Who it is not for: anyone put off by sentiment that reads as overwrought today.