Vacances à Venise

"Summertime" is more of a mood piece than anything else. It captures the loneliness of a traveler in a foreign land, in this case a spinster who is hungry for love but too repressed to accept the love Rossano Brazzi offers. It has a bittersweet ending, appropriate for a thin story that sets the tone early on and never once makes us believe that Hepburn is going to find her true love in Venice.

The photography is gorgeous and must have had everyone heading for the nearest travel bureau for a tour of Italy when the film was released. The performances are all excellent--but the film belongs to Hepburn. She creates one of her most moving and truthful portraits--sensitively showing us what this woman feels as she watches others pairing off for affairs, alone and unable to really connect. The sexual mores of the 1950s permeate the film--the sexual revolution was just over the horizon but not yet evident.

One of Hepburn's most subtle, yet affecting performances. With David Lean's sensitive direction, the gorgeous photography and the evocative background music, "Summertime" will put you under the spell of its fragile romance. Easy to see why Brazzi was the ultimate continental charmer.

Jane Hudson (Katherine Hepburn), a middle-aged American school teacher, arrives in Venice, fulfilling a lifelong dream… On her first evening, she has an encounter with Mauro, an enterprising little street child, who becomes her unofficial escort… But in the evening, while seating in a crowded café, she sees a handsome man in a gray flannel suit... Her first instinctive reaction was to oppose, pay the bill, escape, and keep out of sight...

The next evening, she sits alone to take a drink in the Piazza San Marco, but with a wandering eye… As the violins begin playing 'Summertime in Venice', Jane would turn away in a heart beat to see Renato passing by… To hide her anxiousness, she inclines the chair next to her, pretending that she is expecting a company... Jane has come to Venice to find a handsome, unmarried hero of her dreams... But she is furious and resentful... She really can't understand what she is doing...

The most advantageous thing about David Lean's 'Summertime' is its sensitive portrait of the loneliness that holds back the fancy secretary, a desperately single heroine whose search for romance and adventure is prevented less by cultural differences than by her own feeling defenses...

Hepburn is a pleasant tourist with great magnetism... Rossano Brazzi is too powerful, tempting and charming as Renato, the Venetian who couldn't catch a fallen white gardenia in one of the canals of his town

I have watched this film tens of times. I have never seen a city filmed so beautifully as Venice in this film. The photography is smooth, and travelling shots just perfect. The sights, the sounds and above all the haunting music of the film are just something else. Apart from the title theme " Summertime in Venice ", I have never managed to find the rest of the music on a cd or LP. The weather was obviously anticyclonic and perfect when they shot the film and the colours are unbeatable. I found it on DVD ( Criterion ) but if the picture quality is perfect, there are no subtitles, other language tracks or bonus features, all of which is a great shame considering the film is so beautiful.

The plot is thin, Hepburn's reactions of a frustrated spinster are annoying at times and the film's end is unsatisfying either way. But these negative points will not stop me from watching again and again this film. It is pure 1950's gold. I wonder whether Venice today has

the same charm as in the film .............

The mood is leisurly, the pace deliberate, and the look of Venice is shimmering and magical. This "brief encounter" of an American spinster on vacation falling for a married, though separated, man is David Lean as his best. It is also one of Katherine Hepburn's lovely performances. Having read about production problems with this film, it became all the more remarkable to watch. To name a few, Hepburn suffered severe eye damage from her spill in the stagnant canal (in a remarkable shot without use of a double) and the stench from the waters aggravated ailments left over from her previous "African Queen." Also her private life during the filming mirrored the quiet desparation of the heroine, due to personal circumstances. Yet all of this is amazingly hidden through the skill of Director Lean and his camera crew. It's a Hepburn "spinster" role she played many times ("Alice Adams," "The Rainmaker") and no one could do it as convincingly. "Summertime" is a kind of film they don't make any more--and for good reason: they couldn't top it. Nor is there a "Hepburn" today able to carry a full production like this on her shoulders as effectively as this legendary actress.

On the familiar ground of brief and intense romance that he worked with so brilliantly in Brief Encounter, David Lean fashions another tale of fleeting romance in Summertime with Katherine Hepburn and Rossano Brazzi.

I have to give Lean credit for one thing that Summertime does better than most other films. I found it impossible to believe that Summertime originated from a one act, one scene play The Time of the Cuckoo which takes place on the front patio of the hotel where Hepburn is staying. The play ran 263 performances during the Broadway 1952-1953 season and netted a Tony Award for Shirley Booth.

Lean makes the city of Venice the real star here in the same way Rome was in Three Coins in a Fountain and Roman Holiday. I love the way Lean photographed the city, it's absolutely first rate.

Summertime is a simple tale of forty something unmarried woman Katherine Hepburn from Akron, Ohhio finding real romance for the first time on a long planned trip to Venice. Sad though, that for reasons quite beyond her control it can't last.

Still with The African Queen, The Rainmaker, and her many films with Spencer Tracy at this time, Kate the great was proving love wasn't just for the young.

For the many fans of Katherine Hepburn and the city of Venice.