Summertime (1955): David Lean’s favourite David Lean film (Blu-Ray Review)

Asked to name a David Lean film, most people would plump for Lawrence of Arabia or The Bridge on the River Kwai before they mentioned Summertime. Yet this holiday romance was Lean’s favourite of his own movies, and Criterion UK’s new Blu-Ray suggests plenty of reasons why. Before he became associated with epic narratives, Lean specialised in intimate, small-scale stories like Brief Encounter and This Happy Breed. 1952’s The Sound Barrier – an ahistorical but irresistible take on the life of Geoffrey de Havilland – saw him paint on a bigger canvas, after which he made two smaller films that initially seemed like steps back. Yet Hobson’s Choice and Summertime are both infused with Lean’s newfound confidence and sense of scale. If Lean had made Summertime in the 1940s, it might have been black and white, filmed in London and starring Celia Johnson. As it is, it’s shot in glorious technicolor, on location in Venice, with Katharine Hepburn in the lead role.

Hepburn plays Jane Hudson, a middle-aged, unmarried American secretary on holiday in Italy. It sounds, on paper, like a surprisingly downtrodden role for one of Hollywood’s most authoritative actresses, but Lean finds some inventive uses for Hepburn’s screen persona. When she first appears, Jane seems to be every bit as independent and self-possessed as Hepburn’s early screwball heroines, and while it’s not exactly a facade, it’s masking some deep regrets about the way her life has gone. The appearance of a handsome stranger played by South Pacific‘s Rossano Brazzi seems to offer her a way out, but it soon turns out she’s not the only one harbouring regrets.

Despite all this, the mood of Summertime is as breezy and sunny as the title implies. In a fantastic 20-minute interview elsewhere on the disc, the film historian Melanie Williams notes that Lean is unafraid of shooting Venice like a tourist, something which must have been a tonic to British audiences still living under wartime austerity. (Remember, this was only six years after Carol Reed rendered continental Europe as a bombed-out shell in The Third Man) It’s a gorgeous travelogue, rendered in the deepest colours and richest shadows by cinematographer Jack Hildyard. Lean’s career as a truly international director begins here.

Summertime‘s tour of Venetian locations is more than just eye candy, although there are always those who will accuse Lean of being a purely spectacle-oriented director. He can thank his technical genius for kick-starting his career – Noel Coward, when asked to write and direct a morale-raising film during World War II, decided he didn’t know enough about the nuts and bolts of film-making and called in the young editor and assistant director Lean to help him out. But for some critics, his eye for composition and beautiful cinematography overshadows the emotional content of his stories.

The thing is, I think Lean knows this is a potential weakness, and he chooses his collaborators based on it. He always works with the best possible screenwriter, whether that’s Coward, Terrence Rattigan or, in this case, Arthur Laurents, who in two years’ time would write the book for West Side Story. Most of all, he has Hepburn, whose sophistication and gift for comic understatement grounds the film whenever it’s in danger of becoming overly florid. In return, Lean gives her one of her most relatable characters. I suspect Lean’s fondness for Summertime is because he relates to Jane so strongly; like the director, she is unlucky in love (Lean married six times!) and eager to travel the world, filming everything she sees. Jane’s little wind-up camera wouldn’t pass muster with Lean, whose visual perfectionism is legendary. But otherwise, they’re just two happy tourists.

The result is disarmingly easy to sink into. It’s slightly too bittersweet to be a pure comedy, although it does contain the unexpected sight of Katharine Hepburn prat-falling into a Venetian canal. It has grace notes of toughness; Jane is followed around by a homeless child who reminds you that, at this point, Italian cinema was synonymous with harsh social realism. Overall, though, it’s an unqualified pleasure. Extras include interviews with Williams and Hildyard, plus a Canadian Broadcast Corporation interview with Lean. The audio quality is a little iffy but the content is deeply revealing: forbidden to see films as a child by his religious family, young David would eagerly absorb all the details of the latest Charlie Chaplin film from the maids. It’s hard to read his cinema as an emotionless, technical exercise once you hear a story like that.

Summertime (1955)