Haunted Summer

I first saw this on TV in the early 90's and was obsessed with finding it so I could tape it. I dwelled on it and searched and finally found it at a library and had a friend copy it. It was beautifully filmed and captivated me completely. I have watched it many times, each time was better than previously. I'm a 68 year old senior and am "haunted" by it. I only wonder how much, if any, truth is in it. I give it 10 out of 10; it was so mesmerizing.

In this glorious telling of a weekend shared among literary greats. Mary and Percy Shelly,Lord Byron and others created a entrancing group. Showing their quests for sexual enlightenment. Personal freedoms from political to moral. Liberal drug use for both stimulations and as addiction. Their creative views of life and writing. Describing without boring the viewer how each writer seeks to find their muse. Along with the distractions and affections each share. With breathtaking scenery that does not detract but very much enhances the story. Well created characters from grim to loving then angry to peaceful. With some of the most lovely and scene enhancing costuming to be had.

I saw this film in the late 80s and discovered when wanting to see it again, that it had fallen into semi-oblivion, being streamed by hardly anyone and available only on a 2022 DVD, which I bought. Here, where reviews usually number in the hundreds or even thousands, it has thirteen, evenly split between loving and hating it. The DVD opens with a slightly ominous disclaimer noting that it has been assembled from the best sources available. This means that the film had fallen into such neglect that the producers of the DVD had to use multiple copies of it to make a suitable disc. The result is fortunately that there are no scratches or spots on the final copy and the lighting and color are consistent. On the other hand the image seemed like it needed sharpening, more like a VHS image.

The film was produced by Golan-Globus, another anomaly as they were known for dumping low quality films on the market and made most of their money with Charles Bronson andChuck Norris. They rarely ventured into this kind of Merchant-Ivory territory. The screenplay was adapted from the novel of the same title by Ann Edwards, another anomaly, as she was known for writing celebrity biographies that include Princess Diana, Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand and Maria Callas. It was directed by Ivan Passer, an associate of Milos Forman. He assembled a good cast of rising young actors and has an understanding of the period and the young celebrities of Romantic literature on whom it focuses. The 1980s was a time when this particular group was beginning to be seen as the first true moderns and Byron in particular as an early version of a rock star. As he himself wrote, "I awoke one morning and found myself famous".

, Anyone going this far to acquire this film will know who the main characters are so I won't go into their backgrounds and histories. If you don't. I recommend at least reading about them because this muddled film will not give you much to go on. Of course a film has to change some things and condense others in order to fit an acceptable run time, and this film does that, getting most of it right. Though the Shelleys lived in their own residence and not at Villa Diodati with Byron, this is where such shorthand gets it right by putting them all together. Percy Shelley was a young, idealistic political radical, challenging everything society held to be self-evident and flaunting his atheism. Byron was in the middle of writing "Childe Harolde" by this time and was much more realistic and cynical than Shelley, favoring practical reform over utopian daydreams and becoming ever more aware of the darker side of humanity and disillusioned with a life of opulent hedonism. Mary Shelley (still Godwin here) was the one with sense while her step sister Claire was full of emotional sensibility and given to fits of "the horrors" and threats of suicide and was the one who suggested visiting Byron in Switzerland, primarily to get close to him herself. Dr. Polidori was in fact hired as Byron's physician and it's quite likely that that is all he was, but he was only twenty and here is presented as Byron's much-abused lover, I suppose to indicate Byron's documented bisexuality.

The complicated relationships here are clearly shown. Shelley, a strong believer in free love, did likely have an affair with Claire while she lived with him and Mary, but it is thought to be separate and not all three together, as it caused resentment from Mary, who knew about it. Still, it's bold of the film to be clear about the attitudes of these people which were clearly at odds with their times. Byron seemed to think of Claire the way a rock star might think of a groupie from a couple months past; he made it a rule at the villa that Claire could only see him when accompanied by the Shelleys and never by herself. Byron comes off here as a bit of a jerk, and had they kept to the real story he would have seemed even worse.

Everything, including the writing of "Frankenstein - or the New Prometheus" was caused by a volcano. Mt. Tambora in Indonesia had a major eruption in 1815 and the result was 1816 being called "The year without a summer". It was dark and interminably rainy. Many people thought it was the end of the world. These conditions resulted in much time indoors and the reading of ghost stories, which resulted in not only Mary's eventual story but Dr. John Polidori, inspired by Byron's "A Fragment" (about a man who dies, then immediately disintegrates), wrote "The Vampyre", the first modern vampire story. This is where the film gets muddled, as it never mentions, much less re-creates the night of the contest. Was a scene cut out? We see Mary furiously writing several pages but we never learn what these are. We learn that Polidori was offered 500 pounds to write about his travels with Byron causing a falling out between the two, but nothing about "the Vampyre". There is much laudanum and opium smoking, both quite likely, with Byron trying to get Shelley to see the evil in life, but it seems unrelated to everything else.

The film had a built-in centerpiece, but fails to even include it, instead letting Polidori, Claire and eventually even Shelley drift into the background in order to highlight a possible affair between Mary and Byron. The film gets quite muddled in the middle with it being very unclear what is going on, just bouts of conversation between bouts of opium. Then it suddenly ends. The actors are all good in their roles with wonderfully contrasting portrayals by Eric Stoltz (Shelley) and Philip Anglim (Byron), both close in age to the characters in 1816. Laura Dern is as flighty as Claire Clairmont seems to have been and at twenty is about the same age. Alice Krige makes a wonderfully intelligent Mary but seems slightly out of place within this group as she is 33, playing a 19 year old Mary. Alex Winter (known now mostly for "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure") has a difficult role of a petulant companion.

There are still some memorable scenes. A completely nude Shelley prances around a rushing stream with the servants looking on, proclaiming, "I'm Alive!" - the very soul of the sunny side of Romanticism, the living embodiment of Rousseau's child of nature complete unto himself. Later, at a sumptuous luncheon in the villa, Byron toasts his companions, praising them as wanton, as the liveried servants attend them. At this point this group of Romantic iconoclasts seems no different than a group of jaded Versailles aristocrats a generation before and come off as a group of spoiled children, which I believe the director intended. At another point as Shelley is going on about equality and revolution at dinner, the servants look like they're thinking, "yes and we'll still be the servants."The film is meandering and loses its way at times but is still worth seeing.

I would love to comment on this film. Alas , my search has always endeth in vain. If any good citizen could help a desperate inhabitant of this ailing planet and restore his confidence in humanity by offering the whereabouts of either a UK VHS or loan him a DVD copy of the VHS; he would, without reservation, be eternally grateful.....

Blake wrote "The road to excess is the path to wisdom", one hopes my weary road of excess will offer the path to fruition .... If not, I will have to replay the excellent Mr Russel's Gothic in the knowledge that those who have seen Haunted Summer (for better or for worse) have enriched their viewing pleasure of the events of July 1816 whilst I, a fellow member of this melodious plot, rests his lonely case in solitude ...

While "Gothic" (Ken Russell's surprisingly good psychotic drug trip fantasy) has attracted more of a following, this film simply took a different route to chronicle the intensely powerful relationships that existed among this group of artists and writers.

Phillip Anglim's performance dominates every other. He grips the part of Byron with an iron hand and draws the viewer into this story. While, Alice Kreige and Eric Stolz also offer good performances they sometimes become lost in Anglim's. Alex Winter's and Laura Dern's sometimes seem to disappear into the scenery.

While this film is not exactly a masterpiece, it is worthy of more attention than it has had. It makes the lives of these people more accessible than "Gothic" did. It breathes life into people that Americans tend to view simply as moth eaten old poets with scandalous and mythical reputations who's work they are forced to read in school.