Rating: 
Date: 2008-06-02
When??
This movie is 60's classic. I notice the last post on this forum was in 2000! Here it is 2008 and still no DVD! I agree with the majority of reviewers that the junk that is out on DVD is just that...junk. We don't want these classics to be forgotten. Copy it to DVD before the next iteration of technology emerges.
Rating:
Date: 2007-12-20
The laugh-a-minute epic that sent Claudette Colbert into retirement
Studio head Jack Warner envisioned a steamy adult drama when he lured director Joshua (Picnic) Logan to Parrish, and Logan signed up newcomers Warren Beatty and Jane Fonda to make their film debuts; but when all three read the shooting script, they headed for the hills. What Warner got instead was just another unintentionally hilarious hothouse teen soap opera from Delmer Daves, who put his pet player, Troy Donahue, into the title role.
One hundred percent tanned blond beach hunk Troy arrives in tobacco country and utters in his surfer-boy drawl, "Back home in Boston, we don't grow tobacco, we just smoke it." This monumental miscasting is just the tip of the iceberg: The film's chock full of shapely studio contract players who look like they've wandered in from the set of Donahue's TV series "Surfside Six." Troy's faced with having to choose between the three babes who lust after him: wanton field hand Connie Stevens ("When it gets hot, I sleep raw."), nice girl Sharon Hugueny ("If I were a dog and somebody made me beg, I'd bite."), and bad rich girl Diane McBain ("I'll buy what I want -- even a lover").
Talk about wandering onto the wrong soundstage: Claudette Colbert, of all people, turns up as Troy's mother. It's been speculated that having to play scenes opposite Donahue was reason enough for Colbert to retire after Parrish, but an even likelier reason lies in the fact that Colbert is cast opposite another seasoned pro, Karl Malden. Colbert probably took one look at his career and realized that things were only going to get much worse for actors their age, about which she was dead right. Malden's film career from Parrish on reads like a primer titled "When Bad Movies We Love Happen to Good Actors." (He also turns up in Come Fly With Me, Dead Ringer, Hotel, Meteor, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, and The Sting II, for starters.)
By the time of the Colbert-Malden wedding, director Daves stops pretending to present the storyline straight-faced: Troy confronts his stepbrother with the news that Troy knows he fathered Connie's illegitimate baby, just as a band singer croons "My secret love's no secret anymore." (Would we lie to you?) Disgusted by the mores of the very rich, Troy runs off to join the Navy. He seems mighty happy during his two years on a sub, and when he returns it shows. Looking Troy up and down, a local farmer observes, "You left your boyhood behind you." "Yes," says Troy with a knowing smile, "one night under the ice at the North Pole . . . it separated the men from the boys." However, before we're given a chance to dwell on that, Troy hurriedly picks out Hugueny -- the only female in the cast left -- and Daves rushes us to the happy ending. (Still, we're left wondering, What happened on that sub?)
Rating:
Date: 2007-02-05
give us more Warner Bros
I agree with other people on here. Warner Bros have finally released A SUMMER PLACE on dvd but what about Palm Springs Weekend, Susan Slade, Sex and the Single Girl and all those other wonderful Warner films of the 60s. I also get sick and tired of the flood of films for those under 25 but it is us older viewers who want to see these cinema classics. Please give them to us Warner Bros as the 20th Century Fox films have.
