|
VIAGRA WASN’T AROUND THEN David Lean’s 1955 Summertime is still the best Venice travelogue ever made. Lensed by Jack Hildyard, it’s the Venice of one’s sunniest dreams—light years away from the pestilence of Death in Venice or the hocus pocus of Don’t Look Now. Nevertheless, there’s trouble of the sinking, rotting kind: seldom have the grating voice and peculiarities of Katharine Hepburn been more inappropriate or gaggy. Is there anyone who doesn’t cringe when she’s trying to discreetly spy on Rossano Brazzi in St. Mark’s Square, or when she pretends her table’s booked? How could Brazzi, deemed the foremost Latin lover of his movie heyday, have managed to get it up for this aging fawn with icy bones stuck in an Eisenhower time warp? (Viagra wasn’t on the market yet. And apparently he didn’t have one to get up in The Barefoot Contessa.) Hepburn’s self-pitying lovelessness is more than upchucky, it’s overt solicitation—the counterfeit grand dame of American movie actresses is whoring it up. While not every scene an embarrassment, far too many are, and particularly the insanity of falling into a canal: not only a worthless plot detail, it also turned out to be injurious to Hepburn’s eyes. Precautions were taken to prevent infections resulting from repeated falls into the brownish green slim, yet no one thought to have Hepburn flush her eyes, henceforth the frequent tearing in just about every movie afterwards and progressively worsening in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Doing her usual ditz, Jane Rose as Mrs. McIlhenny is a respite. In England, the movie’s title was changed to Summer Madness. Did the publicity machines know how right they got it? Text COPYRIGHT © 2005 RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved.
|