- Main Title
- Dignity
- Pine Island Off The Port Bow
- There's A Boy Watching Me!
- Flotsam And Jetsam
- Romance Remembered
- Bright Dreams / The Garden
- A Filthy Word
- Alone In The Attic
- A Small! Prayer
- The Boat House
- Shipwrecked
- Returning Home
- The Examination
- Hiding Among The Rocks
- Harlot Of A Mother
- A Common Slut / Molly Found
- Scandal!
- A Letter To Johnny
- Long Distance Call
- Liebestraum
- Lohengrin
- Merry Christmas Mama!
- Ken Visits Molly At Briarwood
- Ken And Sylvia's House
- Reunion On The Beach
- Shacking Up
- Passion Discovered
- Be Sensible
- Holding Hands At Briarwood
- Drunken Father
- Homecoming / End Title
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)
