Too much of everything

Just perfect...

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

The American secretary Jane Hudson (Katharine Hepburn) travels from Ohio to Venice. Jane is a middle-age single and lonely woman that have saved money for her dream trip. On the arrival, she immediately befriends the owner of the boarding house Signora Fiorini (Isa Miranda). During the night, she goes to a café and an Italian helps her to call the waiter. Jane feels sort of uncomfortable for being alone and on the next day, she sees a red glass goblet in the window of an antique store. The owner Renato de Rossi (Rossano Brazzi), who is the man that helped her, explains that it is an ancient goblet from the Eighteenth Century and therefore expensive; then he also explains that she should always bargain for a lower price in Venice. Jane recognizes Renato from the previous night and becomes clumsy. Soon Renato woos her but the needy Jane is afraid to love."Summertime" is a deceptive film directed by David Lean and with Katharine Hepburn. Her character is a tight and awkward spinster and the romance with Rossano Brazzi has no chemistry. Most of the time the viewer has a tour through Venice and a tasteless romance. My vote is six.Title (Brazil): "Quando o Coração Floresce" ("When the Heart Blossoms")

If you're a young royal princess, you can reap a gleeful fling in Rome with nothing to worry except for paparazzi's cameras, like Audrey Hepburn in William Wyler's ROMAN HOLIDAY (1953); but for another legendary Hepburn, Katharine, who plays Jane Hudson (the namesake of Bette Davis' Baby Jane in Robert Aldrich's WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? 1962) in this completely shot-in-Venice wanderlust abettor directed by David Lean, her Venetian holiday is not all that glamorous like the locale in its Technicolor beguilement.Jane is an American secretary from Ohio, middle-aged and unmarried, the vacation is a once-in-a- life-time adventure for her (not just monetarily speaking), in a certain degree, as if she is looking for something, or some reason to live on, there is no complemented background story about her character, but she is the almighty Hepburn, even acting against nobody but herself, she can elicit sympathy with just one single expression, a strained twitch on her face, or a look betrays her smoldering despair.The exotic flirtation is a standard configuration under such circumstances, here comes Renato de Rossi (Brazzi), a dapper Italian who is the owner of an antique shop in Venice. Mutual attractions spark spontaneously, but the romance must undergo a more tortuous progress to permit Jane to lower her bars, she has to accept the ravioli and forget the beefsteak (can you conjecture the subtext even if you haven't seen the movie yet?), on the condition that she could hardly endure the loneliness, which has been mercilessly amplified for a partner-less tourist, in a city like Venice.What could happen between Jane and Renato? As in the scene where Renato is trying to reach a floating gardenia, their denouement is foreshadowed and in Lean's slick illustration, it recurs to hone up the climatic arrivederci. An interlude of both sides, Hepburn bolsters up steadily as the emotional core of the film, and Brazzi charms, confronts, coerces and unyieldingly courts the balking Jane to a sweet surrender, the common pitfalls for a tourist play out a shade too neatly, firstly, questioning the authenticity of the antique you have just purchased; secondly, resisting the persistent hawking from the local, even if he is as cherubic as the boy Mauro (Autiero), you can generously dole out a cigarette, tip him for being a useful guide, but don't buy anything he is offering, unless he is willingly to give it to you as a parting gift; then finally, doubting the marital status of your charming wooer, and don't be shock to learn that he is unhappily married. When the summer is vanishing, a real smart girl (in America, any woman under 50 can be referred as a girl, says Jane) should know how to part ways, at least the tears are real, don't overstay your welcome, it is a great advice to every tourist who needs to find something special to reinforce one's frame- of-mind, most of the time, travelling only serves to spur us to go back home sooner.

Good grief, you have to wonder what planet anyone who calls this a love story -- or even a romance -- is living on. Because the middle-aged female protagonist is supposedly a virgin, we are expected to be thrilled that she falls prey to a shameless, predatory liar. "Renato" (Rosanno Brazzi), the owner of an antiques shop, hangs out in the Piazza San Marco looking for solitary women to leer at. He begins his pursuit of "Jane" (Katharine Hepburn) by lying to her about an item she is interested in buying from him, and continues his pursuit of her by lying to her in order to make her think he isn't married (which he is). A particularly nice touch is the scene in which Jane, horrified to discover that her widowed landlady has been sleeping with the husband of a new young acquaintance, is scolded by Renato for being moralistic and overly concerned with others' behavior. Wow. I guess he would say that. (Ya think?) But Jane, sensing that she must learn to appreciate this strange, new way of looking at things, takes his rebuke to heart.When Renato finds himself delayed on the way to their first big date, he sends his courteous, clean-cut son (who is also his shop assistant) to tell her that, scusi signora, the gentleman is going to be just a little late. (Apparently this has happened before; the lad seems perfectly comfortable delivering a message to a woman his father clearly intends to commit adultery with...or maybe his dad told him that he moonlights as a tour guide.) Jane gives the young man a cigarette, and in the course of their brief conversation learns (surprise!) that he is not actually Renato's nephew, and that his mother -- Renato's wife -- is fine, grazie! Now Jane is ANGRY -- even more angry than she was when she discovered Renato's previous lies (which his hypnotic gaze, velvety accent and the sheer magic of Venice caused her to forget in under 3 minutes). Our hero now really has his work cut out for him: how to convince the furious Jane that it just plain doesn't MATTER that he has no problem lying about anything and everything -- including his own flesh and blood -- in order to get a woman into bed. Well, what promises to be an uphill battle turns out to be surprisingly easy. He just harps with renewed eloquence on his favorite theme -- the jist of which is "you know you want me" -- and follows her through the streets until she falls into his arms because she just can't help herself.Sadly, it never occurred to David Lean that in addition to relentlessly filming the outside of beautiful St. Mark's Cathedral, he could actually show his heroine going INSIDE the cathedral to connect with something much better than Mr. Irresistible. But that wouldn't have been "romantic".Because movies were still expected to be at least marginally morally uplifting in those days, Lean did permit Jane to eventually come to her senses (with rather jarring suddenness -- I think he probably was annoyed that he had to end the film on a wholesome note) and get the heck out of Dodge. Smart girl. Dumb movie.

Katharine Hepburn isn't the most overrated movie actress, and she certainly wasn't the worst. But she definitely could be too mannered for her own good. Witness her 1955 Oscar-nominated performance in this David Lean film.Playing a middle-aged single woman who comes to Venice in search of "mystery", and maybe a man to go with it, she pushes up her chin, clenches her teeth in an unconvincing smile, and calls everyone younger than her "cookie" to show she's hip...or something. Then when she finally meets the man (Rossano Brazzi), she can't get away from him fast enough.His line of woo is really one for the ages: "Eat the ravioli, my dear girl. You are hungry.""I'm not THAT hungry.""We're all that hungry.""Summertime" is a marvelous slide show in motion brilliantly featuring one of the world's most beautiful cities. But it never comes together as anything compelling. Lean leans on the superlative work of his cinematographer, Jack Hildyard, in lieu of story or characters.All we know about Kate's character, Jane Hudson, going in is that she's a private secretary who talks in capital letters, like: "I'm From Akron, Ohio, How Do You Do?". We know less about Brazzi's character, except that he sells possibly suspicious antiques and feels something for Jane. When they come together, we get Rossini, fireworks, and not much else other than an abrupt ending. Hey, I wasn't complaining too much. I just wanted it to be over.The secondary characters are even more from hunger. You get the McIlhennys, an American couple as pungent and unsubtle as the sauce they were no doubt named after. There's a painter, his patiently suffering wife, and a maid who sings like she should be on stage, not dusting blinds.Hildyard's brilliance nearly makes up for much. His camera-work captures a lot of amazing colors and detail, as well as a nice sense of dimensionality, like the way Jane's upper-story window looks down on the canals below. At one point, Hepburn even manages a natural line delivery of a good line: "In America, every female under 50 calls herself a girl...after, who cares?"Mostly Hepburn underlines and undermines her character's every emotion, squeezing already-overbaked dialogue too hard, like this consecutive series of lines to Brazzi: "Why did you do that? Oh, I don't think I want to see you again! I love you!" Even before the hugging and kissing starts, she makes sure you get her character's loneliness in every scene, tearing up and grimacing whenever she sees an affectionate couple pass her by on the Piazza San Marco. Lean doesn't help matters. When she meets Brazzi in his store for the first time, Lean makes sure to insert a harp glissando at the moment of their eye contact, in case you don't get the point something really big just happened.Love is a special thing. But you can gild the lily too much even in its service, and gild it even more for a big abrupt sad ending utterly wrong for the characters. Lean and Hepburn were movie legends, and justly so, but "Summertime" reminds you why they have detractors, too.