A Summer Place - Music Composed and Conducted by Max Steiner

1. Main Title
2. Dignity
3. Pine Island Off The Port Bow
4. There's A Boy Watching Me!
5. Flotsam And Jetsam
6. Romance Remembered
7. Bright Dreams / The Garden
8. A Filthy Word
9. Alone In The Attic
10. A Small! Prayer
11. The Boat House
12. Shipwrecked
13. Returning Home
14. The Examination
15. Hiding Among The Rocks
16. Harlot Of A Mother
17. A Common Slut / Molly Found
18. Scandal!
19. A Letter To Johnny
20. Long Distance Call
21. Liebestraum
22. Lohengrin
23. Merry Christmas Mama!
24. Ken Visits Molly At Briarwood
25. Ken And Sylvia's House
26. Reunion On The Beach
27. Shacking Up
28. Passion Discovered
29. Be Sensible
30. Holding Hands At Briarwood
31. Drunken Father
32. Homecoming / End Title

Summer Place

A Summer Place is a 1959 romantic drama film based on the novel of the same name by Sloan Wilson. It was directed by Delmer Daves and stars Richard Egan, Dorothy McGuire, Troy Donahue and Sandra Dee. The film would become famous for its main instrumental theme.

The story examines the adult lives of two onetime teen lovers, Ken (Egan) and Sylvia (McGuire), who were from different social strata. Ken was self-supporting, working as a lifeguard at Pine Island, an exclusive Maine resort, while Sylvia's nouveau riche family stayed as guests of the owners, one summer between years at college. They went on to marry different people – entirely the wrong people, it turned out. Ken's wife Helen (Constance Ford) turns out to be frigid and shuts him out romantically, while Sylvia's husband Bart (Arthur Kennedy) becomes an alcoholic, gradually costing him the family fortune. Ken buries himself in the research chemist's job he finds after college, while Sylvia devotes herself first to charity work, then motherhood.

The saving grace of each marriage is their children, Sylvia's son Johnny (Troy Donahue) and Ken's daughter Molly (Sandra Dee). Ken and Sylvia meet again on Pine Island after twenty years, with Ken now wealthy through his chemistry work, while Bart has turned his family's mansion (their sole remaining asset) into an inn, which is failing. Johnny and Molly meet and fall in love, while Ken and Sylvia begin to cheat on their spouses with each other.

Ken and Sylvia eventually leave their spouses and marry. Bart ends up being taken to a sanitarium for treatment of his alcoholism but not after Johnny and Molly visit him requesting permission to marry as Molly is pregnant.

(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

The composer

Austrian-born film composer Max Steiner (May 10, 1888 – December 28, 1971) was the grandson of the musical impresario who discovered Strauss and brought Offenbach to Vienna. Growing up with a rich heritage of opera and symphony all about him, Steiner developed into a musical prodigy; at the age of 13 he graduated from the Imperial Academy of Music, completing the course in one year and winning the Gold Medal of the Emperor. Already a composer at 14 and conductor at 16, Steiner moved from Austria to England in 1905, remaining there to conduct at His Majesty's Theatre until 1914. With the outbreak of the war, he emigrated to America, where he kept busy with Broadway musicals and operettas. One of his most beneficial American jobs was to compose the music to be conducted during screenings of the silent film The Bondman (1915); he became a friend of William Fox, the film's producer, giving Steiner early entree into the Hollywood that would so gainfully employ him in later years. In 1929, he was brought to fledgling RKO Radio Studios to orchestrate the film adaptation of Ziegfeld's Rio Rita (1929). Always confident in his talents, Steiner was realistic enough to understand that he was hired by RKO because he cost a tenth of what someone like Stokowski would charge. While at RKO, he developed his theory that music should be a function of the dramatic content of a film, and not merely background filling. His scores for such films as Symphony of Six Million (1932), The Informer (1935), and, especially, King Kong (1933) are carefully integrated works, commenting upon the visual images, augmenting the action, and heightening the dramatic impact. While Steiner's detractors would characterize his spell-it-out technique as "Mickey Mousing" (in reference to the music heard in animated cartoons), producers, directors, and stars came to rely upon Steiner to make a good film better, and a great film superb. After 111 pictures at RKO, Steiner was hired by David O. Selznick, who assigned the composer to write the score for Gone with the Wind (1939). Virtually 75-percent of this 221-minute epic required music of some sort, and Steiner rose to the occasion with what many consider his finest work. One concept refined in Gone with the Wind was to give each important character his or her own separate musical motif -- quite an undertaking when one realizes how many speaking parts there were in the film. Around that time, Steiner began working at Warner Bros, where he penned the studio's famous "opening logo" fanfare and also provided evocative scores for such classics as Now Voyager (1942), Casablanca (1942), and Mildred Pierce (1945). A proud, vain man, Steiner frequently found himself the butt of good-natured practical jokes from his fellow composers, but at Oscar time, it was usually Steiner who had the last laugh. He remained active until 1965, contributing scores to The Caine Mutiny (1954), The Searchers (1955), A Summer Place (1959), and many other films. It was only at the very end of his career, with such retrogressive scores as Youngblood Hawke (1964), that Max Steiner's once-revolutionary technique began to sound old hat. 

(by Hal Erickson from allmusic.com)