A Summer Place - 1959 ***

The best thing about this film was the theme tune, I think I knew that before I started watching it. The movie cannot compare to how wonderful and typically 50s the music is.

The movie has become dated, despite the fact it deals with many modern topics such as adultery and teenage pregnancy.

Sandra Dee is utterly infuriating but she isn't the worst thing about the film by far.

A couple and their daughter (Dee) go to a lovely resort on an island in Maine for the summer to spend time together and when they arrive the father bumps into the love of his life whom he left a number of years ago when last at the island. She is now also married and has a son (Richard Egan), but both of them realise they still have feelings for each other and that they are still married to their spouses purely because of convention and their children. The same time they are there, the daughter and the son of the 2 families meet and fall hopelessly in love, despite the almost tyrannical afflictions of the girl's mother, who is completely backward in her way of modern thinking, and believes her daughter is becoming some sort of harlot.

Despite being forbidden to meet or see each other the couple exchange words on the phone and letters when they are back home and plan to meet secretly whenever they can. The next big blow comes when the daughter's father and the son's mother publicly divorce their partners and get married. The 2 children are distraught and refuse to accept it despite going up to spend time with the family in their lovely new home.

The film plays out like a modern day soap opera and the acting is completely ridiculous and over the top. The characters are mostly unlikeable (except for the father of the daughter and the mother of the son) and watching Dee and Egan exchanging romantic words and acting up to their parents gets completely predictable.

This film is only popular (I'm assuming it is actually popular although I have never heard anyone mention the fineness of the film without leaping in to praise the music) because of the breaktaking theme music immortalised by Percy Faith. Nothing more.