Passionate Summer

With such a great cast – Bill Travers, Virginia McKenna and Alexander Knox – and an interesting setting and locale, a private school in Jamaica, this movie should be a winner, right? It is, in fact, a stinker. Douglas Lockwood (Travers) is a gifted teacher at Leonard Pawley's (Knox) school. Pawley's wife (Mitchell) openly pursues Lockwood to the apparent work obsessed indifference of Pawley. Lockwood and his students witness the crash of a small plane in which the pilot is killed but Judy Waring (McKenna) survives. Lockwood then meets Waring in the hospital and their affair begins soon after. Waring is a needy, shallow woman who vacillates between Lockwood and her former lover, a married Argentinean. Lockwood, who seems to be in a daze most of the time, is also trying to help a seriously emotionally disturbed student, Sylvia. For me, all the characters were either uninteresting, unlikable, or both. The Sylvia role was quite large but didn't seem to fit in with rest of the movie other than as a sad and pathetic distraction. I don't regret spending time watching this movie but I certainly won't waste my time watching it again.

Husband and wife Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna were popular English actors in the fifties. They made several films together, the best-known probably being `Born Free'. I think that `Passionate Summer' is one of their lesser efforts. Summer is evident in the sunny West Indian settings but passion is notably lacking, in fact this is typical of the anally retentive English films of the period.

Lantern-jawed Brylcreem boy Bill is an uninteresting actor while English Rose-type Virginia, despite having simultaneous affairs with Bill and a married Argentinean, totally fails to be sexy. They certainly `meet-cute' as Travers watches McKenna survive a light plane crash which kills the pilot. She turns out to be a flight attendant for doomed Pan-American Airlines (the product placement didn't help them at all!) Amid clouds of smoke we see Senior Service cigarettes and I don't think they're still around either. But the predictable boy/meets/loses/finds/girl plotting gives us little to chew on; there's not much in the way of depth or subtext here.

Alexander Knox as the cuckolded headmaster of the school where Travers teaches is stolid in support while Ellen Barrie seems a rather mature-looking troubled pupil.

The Kingston, Jamaica location is attractive, one local is patronized but later a West Indian Coroner proves to be a very wise man.

Overall a pretty tepid affair.