JamesG
07-22-2013, 11:03 PM
10 Overlooked Summer Movies
July 8, 2013
Everyone’s list of favorite summer movies seems to include the obvious – summer camp favorites like Wet Hot American Summer, or surf classic The Endless Summer, or even romance (500) Days of Summer.
To compile our list of summer movies, we stuck to the rule that they have to have “summer” in the title, but otherwise, we tried to stray from the beaten path, to find summer movies you may have overlooked or never seen. Here, then, is a “summer” film festival.
Curl up, watch these classics, and enjoy an air-conditioned respite from the actual summer.
Summer with Monika (1953)
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/614_box_348x490_original_zps7aa7e95e.jpg
It’s easy to think of Ingmar Bergman as a poet of doom, preoccupied with the weightiest of philosophical questions, but there was a time when he just made frank explorations of sex. (Astonishingly, that time was in the early 1950s.)
Here, moony young man Harry (Lars Ekborg) becomes enamored with nubile Monika (Harriet Andersson) and spends an idyllic summer with her on a remote island. But the summer ends with the chill of hard reality. Monika is pregnant, and though Harry is happy to become a father, the free-spirited Monika isn’t ready to be tied down. A tragic separation is inevitable.
Andersson, with whom Bergman was involved off-camera, became an international star, thanks in no small part to the film’s brief nudity, which helped Swedish film gain a reputation abroad for licentiousness. The film made Bergman’s name, too, though there’s little else in his canon like its innocent exploration of sexuality followed by youthful disillusionment.
Summertime (1955)
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/22_box_348x490_original_zpsb87eca18.jpg
The summer vacation fling is a rite of passage – even if you’re a middle-aged tourist, like Katharine Hepburn (in a twist on the spinster roles she played throughout the 1950s). In this adaptation of the Broadway play The Time of the Cuckoo, Hepburn is visiting Venice when she falls for local charmer Renato, (future South Pacific star Rossano Brazzi).
Alas, like so many summer flings, this one can’t last. In one of the few David Lean movies that’s not of epic length, the master of the exotic locale does for Italy what he would do for the desert in Lawrence of Arabia and the Russian tundra in Dr. Zhivago: imbue the very landscape with wonder and portent.
Indeed, the British director liked Venice so much he acquired a second home there. Hepburn, not so much; although she considered the movie some of her best work, she had also insisted on performing her own fall into one of the canals. The water left her with a chronic eye infection.
Smiles of a Summer Night (1955)
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/SummerNight_zps010eeafb.jpg
Another sexy story from Ingmar Bergman? Are we sure this is the right Ingmar Bergman? This farce, set primarily on the shortest night of the year at a turn-of-the-century country house, finds four mismatched couples chasing the wrong partners until everyone is properly sorted out and forgiven their initial lustful follies.
That’s true of both the younger pairs of lovers (including Summer with Monika star Harriet Andersson) and the rueful, mature ones, too. The spirit of gentle, erotic playfulness, which seems to belie the grim and weighty tenor of Bergman’s later work, makes the film a delightful diversion, one picked up later by Stephen Sondheim as the basis for his musical A Little Night Music.
The Long, Hot Summer (1958)
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/8a595f16-7cb5-4072-bdaf-ba2a5a89f66e_zpsa304a49b.jpg
No one does sweaty and sweltering like Paul Newman. The future Hud and Cool Hand Luke star was at his smoldering, insolent youthful peak in this William Faulkner adaptation that paired him with real-life wife Joanne Woodward for the first time.
He’s a possibly dangerous drifter in a Southern town who ingratiates himself with a local mogul (Orson Welles, sweating even more profusely than Newman, and not in an attractive way) and his eligible daughter (Woodward).
Arriving in theaters a few months before Newman’s hot-tempered performance in the similar Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (indeed, Welles seems to be anticipating Burl Ives’ Big Daddy from that film), Summer can seem like a pale copy of the more celebrated Tennessee Williams adaptation.
Still, from the unbuttoned shirts to the burning barns, the characters and the very landscape seem to be ablaze with summer passion.
Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/2d6f4df7-4b41-49fc-a2c3-d7a92c9ac5b1_zpsdcd905e0.jpg
Along with a July 4th visit to Jaws’ Amity Island, this is probably the worst summer vacation ever. In this Tennessee Williams Southern Gothic, Catherine (Elizabeth Taylor) returns from her trip to Spain so traumatized that aunt Violet (Katharine Hepburn) considers having her lobotomized. Especially since that will prevent her from divulging what really became of her cousin Sebastian, Violet’s son.
Montgomery Clift (returning to work after his disfiguring 1956 car accident near Taylor’s home) is the sympathetic shrink who tries to coax the true story out of Catherine. The ultimate unburdening of the secret is so grotesque that it unhinges even Aunt Violet.
It’s still a pretty shocking story today, less for its candid acknowledgement of Sebastian’s homosexuality than for the horrific karmic price he pays for his frankness.
Jazz on a Summer's Day (1960)
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/fa7f09ff-34f3-43df-b951-c44d936892de_zps4c395987.jpg
Fashion and celebrity photographer Bert Stern’s classic concert documentary of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival may be the greatest jazz concert film ever made. It’s also proof that jazz can thrive outside the concert hall and the smoky nightclub and sparkle in the sunlight.
Stern’s vivid color cinematography — and crisp editing by co-director Aram Avakian — lends a you-are-there sensation to the performance footage, and he gets you close enough to the musicians that you’ll feel shaded from the heat by Anita O’Day’s giant hat. He also mixes in footage from the seaside resort town’s America’s Cup yacht race, so you can practically feel the salty breezes as you settle in to enjoy the music.
Some of jazz’s all-time greats are on the bill, including Thelonious Monk, Dinah Washington, Gerry Mulligan, and Louis Armstrong, as well as rock pioneer Chuck Berry and (in a wee-hours performance that closes the show) gospel queen Mahalia Jackson.
Summer and Smoke (1961)
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/106417cb-cc8b-4c7c-87c2-b29b6414bcce_zps2ef36cd8.jpg
That would be a good title for just about any Tennessee Williams play, but this one gets the honors. Geraldine Page recreates her groundbreaking stage role as Alma, a strait-laced minister’s daughter resigned to a life of pious spinsterhood. But then her childhood crush, John Buchanan (Laurence Harvey) re-enters her life and offers her a shot at love.
Of course, he’s no good, a dissolute playboy who has eyes for the town tramp (Rita Moreno, fresh off her Oscar-winning West Side Story performance, and back, unfortunately, to playing Latin-spitfire stereotypes of the sort that made her drop out of movies for many years).
Harvey (The Manchurian Candidate) is his usual indolent self, but Page is, as always, a revelation. She earned an Oscar nomination for the role, as did Una Merkel as Alma’s puerile, taunting mother.
A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy (1982)
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/e7164ced-32b3-4fca-9549-f57a27964580_zpseb97d5f9.jpg
That’s what Shakespeare was originally going to call A Midsummer Night’s Dream, right? If not, he should have.
This uncharacteristically light and bucolic Woody Allen farce borrows from both the Bard and from Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night for its turn-of-the-century country gathering of amorous intellectuals. (Allen streamlined Bergman’s plot by reducing the number of mismatched couples from four to three.)
The movie marks the beginning of Allen’s personal and professional pairing with Mia Farrow, who’s as charming and delightful as anyone else in the picture, though it’s old-timer Jose Ferrer who steals the movie.
Largely dismissed as a trifle 30 years ago, today, the movie looks like the beginning of Allen’s second great period of creative ferment, the one that stretched from Zelig (whose shoot overlapped that of Midsummer) to Crimes and Misdemeanors.
One Crazy Summer (1986)
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/575bd731-30fd-4ac9-9f06-ccaaea157e5d_zps871feee1.jpg
John Cusack is often dismissive of the ’80s teen comedies he made with director Savage Steve Holland, but both Better Off Dead and this follow-up are surreal twists on the genre that deserve not to be forgotten.
The basic narrative is a typical slobs-versus-snobs clash on Martha’s Vineyard, culminating in a yacht race between the preppies and the underdog underachievers – standard fare but for the off-the-wall details added by Holland’s twisted imagination and a colorful cast that includes indispensible ’80s second-bananas Curtis Armstrong (Revenge of the Nerds) and Bobcat Goldthwait.
Yeah, there’s a perfunctory romance between Cusack’s lonely cartoonist and thrush Demi Moore (no, really, she’s a singer), but the heart of the movie is in sequences like the one involving an architectural model of a planned resort community. Goldthwait finds himself in a Godzilla costume, and when a stray lit cigar gets tossed into his mouth, he runs screaming, with smoke billowing from the lizard’s mouth, and stomps all over the tiny town.
Just for building that gag over time and for including it for no good reason, Holland’s movie deserves a place in the summer-comedy hall of fame.
Summer of Sam (1999)
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/d8007751-4dc3-4dc2-b31d-b188c30a6414_zps25d13fef.jpg
Spike Lee excels at movies about New York City summers where inflamed temperatures and inflamed passions lead to conflagrations. After Do the Right Thing and Crooklyn, Summer of Sam seems to conclude a trilogy of movies about the Big Apple in the gone over the edge with apparent heatstroke.
In this case, it’s 1977, and what’s making New Yorkers’ temperatures rise are the serial killer known as Son of Sam and the Reggie Jackson-led, pennant-bound Yankees, not necessarily in that order.
Co-written by and co-starring future "Sopranos" fixture Michael Imperioli, the movie is set primarily in a combustible Bronx neighborhood where paranoia over the still-at-large gunman leads to scapegoating and mob violence.
A then-unknown Adrien Brody is a standout as a local who’s suspected because of his weird ways (it turns out he’s a punk rocker, still a novelty at a time when bands like the Ramones were making downtown New York club CBGB the launch pad for the punk explosion).
With legendary columnist Jimmy Breslin on hand to lend some historical perspective and authenticity, Summer of Sam sizzles with feverish, nightmarish intensity.
http://entertainment.time.com/2013/07/09/hot-finds-10-overlooked-summer-movies-2/slide/in-the-good-old-summertime/
July 8, 2013
Everyone’s list of favorite summer movies seems to include the obvious – summer camp favorites like Wet Hot American Summer, or surf classic The Endless Summer, or even romance (500) Days of Summer.
To compile our list of summer movies, we stuck to the rule that they have to have “summer” in the title, but otherwise, we tried to stray from the beaten path, to find summer movies you may have overlooked or never seen. Here, then, is a “summer” film festival.
Curl up, watch these classics, and enjoy an air-conditioned respite from the actual summer.
Summer with Monika (1953)
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/614_box_348x490_original_zps7aa7e95e.jpg
It’s easy to think of Ingmar Bergman as a poet of doom, preoccupied with the weightiest of philosophical questions, but there was a time when he just made frank explorations of sex. (Astonishingly, that time was in the early 1950s.)
Here, moony young man Harry (Lars Ekborg) becomes enamored with nubile Monika (Harriet Andersson) and spends an idyllic summer with her on a remote island. But the summer ends with the chill of hard reality. Monika is pregnant, and though Harry is happy to become a father, the free-spirited Monika isn’t ready to be tied down. A tragic separation is inevitable.
Andersson, with whom Bergman was involved off-camera, became an international star, thanks in no small part to the film’s brief nudity, which helped Swedish film gain a reputation abroad for licentiousness. The film made Bergman’s name, too, though there’s little else in his canon like its innocent exploration of sexuality followed by youthful disillusionment.
Summertime (1955)
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/22_box_348x490_original_zpsb87eca18.jpg
The summer vacation fling is a rite of passage – even if you’re a middle-aged tourist, like Katharine Hepburn (in a twist on the spinster roles she played throughout the 1950s). In this adaptation of the Broadway play The Time of the Cuckoo, Hepburn is visiting Venice when she falls for local charmer Renato, (future South Pacific star Rossano Brazzi).
Alas, like so many summer flings, this one can’t last. In one of the few David Lean movies that’s not of epic length, the master of the exotic locale does for Italy what he would do for the desert in Lawrence of Arabia and the Russian tundra in Dr. Zhivago: imbue the very landscape with wonder and portent.
Indeed, the British director liked Venice so much he acquired a second home there. Hepburn, not so much; although she considered the movie some of her best work, she had also insisted on performing her own fall into one of the canals. The water left her with a chronic eye infection.
Smiles of a Summer Night (1955)
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/SummerNight_zps010eeafb.jpg
Another sexy story from Ingmar Bergman? Are we sure this is the right Ingmar Bergman? This farce, set primarily on the shortest night of the year at a turn-of-the-century country house, finds four mismatched couples chasing the wrong partners until everyone is properly sorted out and forgiven their initial lustful follies.
That’s true of both the younger pairs of lovers (including Summer with Monika star Harriet Andersson) and the rueful, mature ones, too. The spirit of gentle, erotic playfulness, which seems to belie the grim and weighty tenor of Bergman’s later work, makes the film a delightful diversion, one picked up later by Stephen Sondheim as the basis for his musical A Little Night Music.
The Long, Hot Summer (1958)
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/8a595f16-7cb5-4072-bdaf-ba2a5a89f66e_zpsa304a49b.jpg
No one does sweaty and sweltering like Paul Newman. The future Hud and Cool Hand Luke star was at his smoldering, insolent youthful peak in this William Faulkner adaptation that paired him with real-life wife Joanne Woodward for the first time.
He’s a possibly dangerous drifter in a Southern town who ingratiates himself with a local mogul (Orson Welles, sweating even more profusely than Newman, and not in an attractive way) and his eligible daughter (Woodward).
Arriving in theaters a few months before Newman’s hot-tempered performance in the similar Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (indeed, Welles seems to be anticipating Burl Ives’ Big Daddy from that film), Summer can seem like a pale copy of the more celebrated Tennessee Williams adaptation.
Still, from the unbuttoned shirts to the burning barns, the characters and the very landscape seem to be ablaze with summer passion.
Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/2d6f4df7-4b41-49fc-a2c3-d7a92c9ac5b1_zpsdcd905e0.jpg
Along with a July 4th visit to Jaws’ Amity Island, this is probably the worst summer vacation ever. In this Tennessee Williams Southern Gothic, Catherine (Elizabeth Taylor) returns from her trip to Spain so traumatized that aunt Violet (Katharine Hepburn) considers having her lobotomized. Especially since that will prevent her from divulging what really became of her cousin Sebastian, Violet’s son.
Montgomery Clift (returning to work after his disfiguring 1956 car accident near Taylor’s home) is the sympathetic shrink who tries to coax the true story out of Catherine. The ultimate unburdening of the secret is so grotesque that it unhinges even Aunt Violet.
It’s still a pretty shocking story today, less for its candid acknowledgement of Sebastian’s homosexuality than for the horrific karmic price he pays for his frankness.
Jazz on a Summer's Day (1960)
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/fa7f09ff-34f3-43df-b951-c44d936892de_zps4c395987.jpg
Fashion and celebrity photographer Bert Stern’s classic concert documentary of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival may be the greatest jazz concert film ever made. It’s also proof that jazz can thrive outside the concert hall and the smoky nightclub and sparkle in the sunlight.
Stern’s vivid color cinematography — and crisp editing by co-director Aram Avakian — lends a you-are-there sensation to the performance footage, and he gets you close enough to the musicians that you’ll feel shaded from the heat by Anita O’Day’s giant hat. He also mixes in footage from the seaside resort town’s America’s Cup yacht race, so you can practically feel the salty breezes as you settle in to enjoy the music.
Some of jazz’s all-time greats are on the bill, including Thelonious Monk, Dinah Washington, Gerry Mulligan, and Louis Armstrong, as well as rock pioneer Chuck Berry and (in a wee-hours performance that closes the show) gospel queen Mahalia Jackson.
Summer and Smoke (1961)
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/106417cb-cc8b-4c7c-87c2-b29b6414bcce_zps2ef36cd8.jpg
That would be a good title for just about any Tennessee Williams play, but this one gets the honors. Geraldine Page recreates her groundbreaking stage role as Alma, a strait-laced minister’s daughter resigned to a life of pious spinsterhood. But then her childhood crush, John Buchanan (Laurence Harvey) re-enters her life and offers her a shot at love.
Of course, he’s no good, a dissolute playboy who has eyes for the town tramp (Rita Moreno, fresh off her Oscar-winning West Side Story performance, and back, unfortunately, to playing Latin-spitfire stereotypes of the sort that made her drop out of movies for many years).
Harvey (The Manchurian Candidate) is his usual indolent self, but Page is, as always, a revelation. She earned an Oscar nomination for the role, as did Una Merkel as Alma’s puerile, taunting mother.
A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy (1982)
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/e7164ced-32b3-4fca-9549-f57a27964580_zpseb97d5f9.jpg
That’s what Shakespeare was originally going to call A Midsummer Night’s Dream, right? If not, he should have.
This uncharacteristically light and bucolic Woody Allen farce borrows from both the Bard and from Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night for its turn-of-the-century country gathering of amorous intellectuals. (Allen streamlined Bergman’s plot by reducing the number of mismatched couples from four to three.)
The movie marks the beginning of Allen’s personal and professional pairing with Mia Farrow, who’s as charming and delightful as anyone else in the picture, though it’s old-timer Jose Ferrer who steals the movie.
Largely dismissed as a trifle 30 years ago, today, the movie looks like the beginning of Allen’s second great period of creative ferment, the one that stretched from Zelig (whose shoot overlapped that of Midsummer) to Crimes and Misdemeanors.
One Crazy Summer (1986)
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/575bd731-30fd-4ac9-9f06-ccaaea157e5d_zps871feee1.jpg
John Cusack is often dismissive of the ’80s teen comedies he made with director Savage Steve Holland, but both Better Off Dead and this follow-up are surreal twists on the genre that deserve not to be forgotten.
The basic narrative is a typical slobs-versus-snobs clash on Martha’s Vineyard, culminating in a yacht race between the preppies and the underdog underachievers – standard fare but for the off-the-wall details added by Holland’s twisted imagination and a colorful cast that includes indispensible ’80s second-bananas Curtis Armstrong (Revenge of the Nerds) and Bobcat Goldthwait.
Yeah, there’s a perfunctory romance between Cusack’s lonely cartoonist and thrush Demi Moore (no, really, she’s a singer), but the heart of the movie is in sequences like the one involving an architectural model of a planned resort community. Goldthwait finds himself in a Godzilla costume, and when a stray lit cigar gets tossed into his mouth, he runs screaming, with smoke billowing from the lizard’s mouth, and stomps all over the tiny town.
Just for building that gag over time and for including it for no good reason, Holland’s movie deserves a place in the summer-comedy hall of fame.
Summer of Sam (1999)
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/d8007751-4dc3-4dc2-b31d-b188c30a6414_zps25d13fef.jpg
Spike Lee excels at movies about New York City summers where inflamed temperatures and inflamed passions lead to conflagrations. After Do the Right Thing and Crooklyn, Summer of Sam seems to conclude a trilogy of movies about the Big Apple in the gone over the edge with apparent heatstroke.
In this case, it’s 1977, and what’s making New Yorkers’ temperatures rise are the serial killer known as Son of Sam and the Reggie Jackson-led, pennant-bound Yankees, not necessarily in that order.
Co-written by and co-starring future "Sopranos" fixture Michael Imperioli, the movie is set primarily in a combustible Bronx neighborhood where paranoia over the still-at-large gunman leads to scapegoating and mob violence.
A then-unknown Adrien Brody is a standout as a local who’s suspected because of his weird ways (it turns out he’s a punk rocker, still a novelty at a time when bands like the Ramones were making downtown New York club CBGB the launch pad for the punk explosion).
With legendary columnist Jimmy Breslin on hand to lend some historical perspective and authenticity, Summer of Sam sizzles with feverish, nightmarish intensity.
http://entertainment.time.com/2013/07/09/hot-finds-10-overlooked-summer-movies-2/slide/in-the-good-old-summertime/