Before watching A Summer Place recently, the only movie I had seen with Sandra Dee was Imitation of Life, which was made in the same year, 1959.  She had only a supporting role in that movie, however. As a result, my conception of her was largely formed by that song in Grease (1978), sung by Stockard Channing, which begins as follows:

Look at me, I’m Sandra Dee
Lousy with virginity
Won’t go to bed ’til I’m legally wed
I can’t, I’m Sandra Dee

Later on in the song, Channing refers to Troy Donahue, who is also in A Summer Place:

As for you, Troy Donahue
I know what you wanna do
You got your crust, I’m no object of lust
I’m just plain Sandra Dee

Little did I know that A Summer Place would contradict those lyrics.  In fact, my expectations were lowered to such an extent that I wasn’t expecting any eroticism in this movie at all, especially that provided by Sandra Dee’s character.

The setting of this movie is Pine Island, Maine, where lives the Hunter family.  Because it might be difficult keeping track of who’s who in thIs review, here are the members of this family for easy reference:

The Hunter Family

Father:  Bart (Arthur Kennedy)

Mother:  Sylvia (Dorothy McGuire)

Son:  Johnny (Troy Donahue)

Aunt:  Emily (Beulah Bondi)

We gather that Bart’s father was old money, whose ancestors may even have come over on the Mayflower.  But now the Hunter family doesn’t have any money, no doubt because Bart is an alcoholic who made poor business decisions.  As a result, they have been forced to turn their mansion into a summer inn, where they barely get by financially.

There is a second family, the Jorgensons:

The Jorgenson Family

Father:  Ken (Richard Egan)

Mother:  Helen (Constance Ford)

Daughter:  Molly (Sandra Dee)

Twenty years ago, Ken had worked for Bart’s father as a lifeguard, but he became a research chemist and is now new money, being a millionaire.

Bart receives a letter from Ken, which reads as follows:  “Dear Bart Hunter, I am chartering the yacht Ramona at Nassau and taking my wife and daughter for an extended cruise. I’d like to end up at Pine Island for the summer.”  Bart reads the letter to Sylvia, saying that Ken purposely worked in the part about the “yacht” and the “extended cruise.”  He says that Ken undoubtedly heard that the Hunter family had been wiped out financially, and he wants to come to Pine Island and gloat. Bart imagines Ken saying to himself, “Maybe Bart Hunter will carry my bags. I might even give him a tip.”  Bart intends to turn him down.

Sylvia insists that they cannot afford to be proud, that they need the money.  She even goes so far as to say they can let the Jorgenson family have their rooms in the mansion, while the Hunter family will stay in the gardener’s cottage out back.

Bart is incredulous:  “In the servants’ quarters?  Where he even slept himself before with the hired help? That’s ridiculous.”

Sylvia may have another reason for wanting to let the Jorgensons stay at their inn. When Bart first mentioned Ken’s name, she turned around suddenly, accompanied by dramatic music, suggesting that there may have been something going on between her and Ken at one time.  Anyway, she wins the argument.

The scene shifts to the yacht, where we learn that it is Helen, not Ken, who wants to act superior. She bought Ken some yachting clothes, including a cap bearing the insignia of the Nassau Yacht Club, to which Ken does not belong.  Not wanting to pretend to be something he is not, he throws the cap out the porthole, telling Helen that people on Pine Island will remember he used to be a lifeguard, and he does not want to try “putting on the dog.”

As they approach Pine Island, Ken goes up on deck and calls Molly to join him. She looks through binoculars and sees a boy, Johnny, looking at her through binoculars.  She says to her father:

There’s a boy up there watching me. There he goes. Funny feeling, being looked at without knowing it. Remember that family that lived next door to us back home? … Their son used to look at me…. Well, his bedroom was right across from mine. And one night, I felt naughty and went right on undressing so he could see. And then all of a sudden, I got terribly ashamed, and I ran to pull the curtains down. I’ll never forget, I had hot and cold flushes all over me afterwards. Wasn’t that awful?

I have to admit to feeling flushed myself, listening to Molly talk about getting undressed in front of a window so the boy next door could see her naked.  And then it occurred to me that since she was talking to her father, that meant that for the purpose of that scene, I was identifying with her father, and that meant that her erotic story was tinged with incestuous desire.

This reminded me of the movie Fright Night (1985), where the attractive mother of a teenage boy tells him about a dream she had where, all of a sudden, she was “stark naked.”  I’m not sure how many women would tell their teenage sons about some dream they had where they were naked, but I would advise against it.  It’s hard enough to suppress such thoughts without having your mother put that image into your head.  Of course, the scriptwriter purposely had her tell her son about a dream like that in order to add Oedipal angst to his problems.

By the same token, the scriptwriter of A Summer Place purposely had Molly tell her father about getting naked for the boy next door.  Unlike me, however, Ken seems unaffected by this.  He merely tells Molly that everyone has done something he is ashamed of.  In any event, this is the first instance in this movie of a motif in which would-be lovers look at each other through the windows of their bedrooms.

Apparently, Helen believes that Molly’s body, even when fully dressed, is something to be ashamed of. Molly runs to Ken for support, saying Helen wants her to wear an “armor-plated bra” and a “cast-iron girdle.”  Helen enters the room and starts arguing with Ken, who takes the bra and girdle away from Molly and sends her out of the room.  He accuses Helen of trying to de-sex Molly.

At first, this confused me.  I could understand how making Molly look flat-chested would diminish her sex appeal, but why the girdle?  Isn’t that supposed to make a woman look prettier by giving her an attractive shape?

As I thought about this, I remembered a girlfriend I had once who had two books on her bookshelf, The Joy of Being Single and How to Marry the Man of Your Choice.  I guess she was covered either way.  On evenings where I had to wait for her to get ready for our date, I would read portions of that latter book. The author, Margaret Kent, had some pretty good advice.  One such piece of advice for a woman was to “dress friendly.”

By that she meant that a woman should dress in a manner that would make it easy for a man to imagine undressing her.  When I was in high school, I had a girlfriend who “dressed friendly.”  When we went to the drive-in, I had no trouble at all removing her clothes, which was as it should have been, allowing us to indulge our passions without obstacle or delay.

A year later, while in college, I had another girlfriend.  One night at another drive-in, while we were doing some heavy petting, I ran into her girdle.  I don’t know how much trouble it is for a woman to remove a girdle and later put it back on, but I suspected it would not be easy at a drive-in movie theater, so I never managed to get past that thing.  I still loved her, of course, and would have continued to do so nevertheless, had not her fiancé shown up unexpectedly one night.  The main thing, however, is that she was not dressing friendly.

In other words, while the bra Helen wanted Molly to wear would have taken away her sex appeal by making her look flat-chested, the girdle was intended to act as an impediment to the consummation of male lust.  Ken has a permissive attitude about Molly’s sexuality, however, and he throws the bra and girdle out the porthole.

When the Jorgensons arrive at the inn, Bart’s aunt and godmother, Mrs. Emily Hamilton Hamble, recognizes Ken, asking him if he is still a lifeguard.  She muses about Molly, saying, “Hardly proper to be so pretty. Seems to me that all the nice girls I know are either too fat or too thin or have bad skin and thick ankles.” Mothers of girls like that don’t have to bother with bras and girdles.  Such girls have a natural protection against indecency.

When the Jorgensons are shown their two-bedroom suite, Helen says she and Molly will take one bedroom, and Ken can have the other.  No more need be said regarding that arrangement.  Then Helen tells Molly to be sure to clean the toilet seat.  In those days, it was often said that you could get syphilis off a toilet seat.

When Ken looks out his bedroom window from the second floor, he can see through the window of the gardener’s cottage on the ground floor, where Sylvia looks back at him, recalling Molly’s adventure in front of open windows.  They gaze into each other’s eyes, once again suggesting that there used to be something between them.

That evening at dinner, Sylvia begins explaining about her and Bart’s decision to live at Pine Island all year, telling of the “bright dreams” she had before concluding with this:

And then after the summer season was over, I was going to abandon all convention, go back to nature. Take off my clothes, walk on the beaches in the sun, swim once again in the moonlight.

Once more, I started feeling flush.  In none of the movies I had seen starring Dorothy McGuire was she supposed to be sexy, so my expectations for her in this movie were like those I had for Sandra Dee.  But hearing her talk about walking the beaches naked during the day and swimming naked at night was having an effect on me like that of Molly’s strip tease with the curtains open. Fortunately, before she said all this, Johnny offered to show Molly the grounds, and they left the table, so he was spared having that image of his mother placed in his head.

Meanwhile, Johnny and Molly have paused by a fountain featuring a statue of Cupid.  She offers herself to be kissed.  When Johnny asks, somewhat gauchely, where she learned to kiss so perfectly, she tells of how she and a boy in high school used to kiss regularly, even though they were not going steady.  Although it is only kissing that they are talking about, Johnny is in awe of how casual she is about sex and more experienced than he is.  When they return to the inn, she asks him if they will be able to see each other from their respective bedroom windows.  When he says they will, she says she will wave goodnight.

Unfortunately, Helen saw them kissing.  When Molly returns to her bedroom, she overhears Helen telling Ken, “Your daughter didn’t waste any time,” saying she let Johnny “kiss and maul her,” that her behavior was “cheap.”  She says Molly must have Ken’s Swedish blood in her, saying, “I’ve read about how the Swedes bathe together….”  Clearly, being naked is the theme of this movie.

After Helen returns to the bedroom she shares with Molly, we find Molly getting undressed, down to her slip and removing her stockings.  Molly tells her mother that she should argue with her and leave her father alone. Helen admonishes her:

Must you parade before open windows like a strip-teaser? The way to get accepted here on Pine Island is certainly not by prancing past open windows and giving away cheap kisses behind the inn.

Molly goes to the window, where she can see Johnny looking up at her.  She smiles, waves, and lets him look at her before pulling down the shade.  Then she goes to the next window, smiles, waves, and lets him look some more.

Helen tells Molly that she has no objection to Johnny, that he would make a good catch, but that she has to “play a man like a fish.”  Molly agrees and then goes to say goodnight to her father.

She gets right in bed with him and snuggles up really close.  She asks him why he married her mother. He answers that he was lonely, that he once loved another woman, but “she married the other guy.”

Molly asks why they don’t share the same bedroom, but she knows the answer already, that Helen is anti-sex:

She says all a boy wants out of a girl is that, and when the girl marries, it’s something she has to endure. I don’t want to think like that, Papa. She makes me ashamed of even having a body. And when I have a naughty dream at night, she makes me feel like hanging myself.  How can you help what you dream?

As she says this, she looks up at her father tenderly, her lips parted and within inches of his lips.  He looks down at her with affection, assuring her that she can’t help having those naughty dreams.  He tells her that the sole reason for our existence is to love and be loved.

And then, to disabuse us of any naughty thoughts we might be having ourselves, she kisses him lightly on the cheek, says goodnight, and leaves the room.

Eventually, Ken and Sylvia happen to be alone together in the attic, where they confess that they never stopped loving each other.  Sylvia says Bart knew there was something wrong on their wedding night. They agree to meet in the boathouse that night.  However, because of a vent connecting the attic with the room below, Aunt Emily overheard everything.  We thought she was a prude, but she turns out to be a woman of the world, suggesting that Sylvia get a divorce. Sylvia is afraid she would lose custody of Johnny.  In that case, Aunt Emily suggests having an affair.

When Ken and Sylvia meet that night, they discuss those options.  Like Sylvia, Ken is afraid he would lose custody of Molly in case of a divorce.  As a result, they agree to have an affair, Sylvia saying, “I’m perfectly willing to come to you whenever you want me,” and Ken saying, “I love you too much to speak.”

Meanwhile, Johnny and Molly take a boat ride, but the sea gets rough, and their boat capsizes, forcing them to spend the night on a small island.  Nothing happens between them, and the Coast Guard rescues them the next day.  Unfortunately, Ken had to go to Boston for a few days, so he is not present to protect Molly from Helen’s suspicions.  She brings Molly to their bedroom where a grim-faced doctor is waiting. Helen says to her, “Take off every stitch you’ve got on, and let him examine you.” Molly becomes defiant, insisting she did nothing wrong.  Helen leaves the room, and the doctor forcibly grabs Molly as she becomes hysterical.  It is left to us to imagine the doctor making her to get completely naked so he can examine her hymen.

After this, there is much melodrama.  Molly runs away, Johnny threatens to kill Helen, Helen calls the sheriff, Ken returns from Boston and says he wouldn’t have blamed Johnny if he had killed Helen, and Helen says that would have made it easier for him to have sex with Sylvia, having found out about their affair from the groundskeeper.  Both sets of parents get divorced, and their children hate them for it, while being sent off to different schools.

Ken and Sylvia get married and move into a new home.  They invite Johnny and Molly to spend a couple of weeks with them.  Johnny and Molly agonize over whether they should be good or bad, but finally give in to their desires and have sex.  They are so young and innocent that they don’t realize that if you are in a movie, and you have sex just once, the girl always gets pregnant.  And so, she does.

But it has an upside.  Now that Johnny and Molly have been bad, they find they are able to forgive Ken and Sylvia for being bad, who in turn see to it that Johnny and Molly get married.  Bart’s ulcers are so severe that he will have to go into a hospital permanently, so the inn is turned over to Johnny and Molly, who will run it from now on and live happily ever after.

It’s interesting that at no point in this movie do Johnny and Molly discuss using birth control.  But then I remembered this other girl I knew in college.  As she explained it to me, one night at the drive-in, if an unmarried man and woman get carried away and have sex, God will forgive that.  But if they use birth control, then they are acting with deliberation, which makes it a mortal sin.  That dampened my desires.  I never even found out whether she was wearing a girdle.  A couple of years later, she got pregnant and had to get married.  But not to me.

Those in charge of enforcing the Motion Picture Production Code would probably have agreed with her.  For all the loosening of censorship by 1959, birth control was still taboo.  As a result, contrary to what was said in the song from Grease, Sandra Dee might lose her virginity in a moment of passionate love, but it would have been unthinkable for her to tell Troy Donahue use a rubber.