SUMMER MADNESS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 899, 26 October 1956, Page 18

SUMMER MADNESS

| (London Films-Lopert Films) Y Cert. | CUMMER MADNESS, you could complain, is another of David Lean’s brief encounters, but with a setting so different, a story sod well told, a mood

and an atmosphere so wonderfully caught, who would complain? Into Venice, movie-camera in hand, comes Katherine Hepburn- she’s Jane Hudson, a not unattractive American spinster. Venice had better be good, she has saved for it for a lifetime. Before we know it we’re as drunk with its beauty and romance as she is, and that’s pretty drunk. This heat. does things to me, says another guest at the pensione. It does things to Jane, too. All the same, lonely as she is and overcome by the place, she still fights a little when she meets Renato (Rossano Brazzi), middleaged (married, too) and romantic. They kiss, dance,. love, till Jane abruptly decides she has grown’ up: never again will she stay too long at a party because she doesn’t know when to leave. Venice on film was never lovelier than Jack Hildyard’s Eastman Colour camera makes it, and the script, by Mr, Lean and H. E. Bates (an old hand with a love story) from the Arthur Laurents play The Time of the Cuckoo, is well written. But Miss Hepburn, in a finely sensitive performance, and Mr. Lean the director are the big, stars of this magi- cal piece: note, for example, his imaginative cutting, his use of sound-the city’s clamour, Alessandro Cicognini’s score, and his choice of detail-a red shoe, dancing feet, a gardenia floating in the canal. Miracles can happen, one of the characters remarks, and this one we see for ourselves. The bitter-sweet taste of transient love in a foreign place was never ‘better caught.