Judging from the films I’ve seen from the decade, the 50s were a time when everyone was obsessed with sex but nobody felt comfortable talking about it.  Boys were, of course, allowed to do whatever they wanted, as long as they kept their hair perfectly straight and went out for a school team or two.  Girls, meanwhile, were divided into “good girls” and “bad girls.”  The most important thing in the world was to remain a good girl and to understand that the bad girls really weren’t having as much fun as they appeared to be having.  As for adults, their lives apparently revolved around sheltering their daughters and encouraging their sons to go get laid.  Now, to be honest, the culture really hasn’t changed that much.  I guess what distinguished 50s hypocrisy from the hypocrisy of today is that people in the 50s were apparently so much more sincere about that hypocrisy.

Case in point: 1959’s A Summer Place.  A Summer Place is one of those films where everyone is obsessed with sex but nobody can ever come right out and admit it.  It’s a film where people seem to exclusively speak in the language of euphemism.  It’s a film, about sex, in which you never see anyone actually having sex though, of course, there is an unplanned pregnancy towards the end of it.  That was the 50s for you.  Have sex outside of marriage once and you’re pretty much guaranteed to get knocked up.  You just better hope that the father is played by Troy Donahue.

(Has ever an actor has a more appropriate name than Troy Donahue?  The name itself just resonates a certain handsome blandness.)

In A Summer Place, Troy Donahue plays all-American boy Johnny Hunter.  Johnny’s father (played by Arthur Kennedy) is an alcoholic.  Johnny’s mother, Sylvia (Dorothy McGuire), is frustrated with her perpetually drunk husband and spends her days dreaming of a lifeguard that she once knew.  The Hunters own an inn, located on beautiful Pine Island off the coast of Maine.

One summer, Ken (Richard Egan) and his cold wife Helen (Constance Ford) come to stay at the inn.  Accompanying them is their teenage daughter, Molly (Sandra Dee).  Helen insists on trying to control every aspect of Molly’s life.  Ken, on the other hand, takes a much more relaxed attitude towards his daughter.  When Molly complains that Helen forces her to wear a bra and a girdle, Ken grabs his daughter’s underwear and tosses it all into the ocean.

(Uhmmm …. yeah, that’s more than a little creepy…)

Molly meets Johnny and, despite the fact that the stiff Troy Donahue generates absolutely zero romantic  sparks, the two of them soon fall in love. (It probably has something to do with the Theme From A Summer Place, a hypnotic piece of music that plays on the soundtrack whenever the two of them so much as even glance in each other’s direction.)  Helen, however, doesn’t want Molly to have anything to do with Johnny.  When Molly and Johnny spend a day stranded on an island together, Helen forcefully checks to make sure that Molly’s virginity is still intact while Molly repeatedly shouts, “I WANT MY FADDAH!  I WANT MY  FADDAH!”

However, her father is not there because he’s too busy having an affair of his own.  It turns out that Ken is the former lifeguard who Sylvia Hunter once loved…

And through all of the complications and the melodrama (and believe me, there’s a lot), the Theme From A Summer Place keeps on playing in the background.

Apparently, A Summer Place was considered to be incredibly risqué back in 1959.  Watched today, it all seems to be rather quaint and, in its way, oddly likable.  It’s not necessarily a good film but it’s an agreeable enough offering if you’re looking to waste two hours with whatever happens to be on TCM.  As opposed to some of the other regular directors of 50s melodrama —  like Douglas Sirk and Nicholas Ray — director Delmer Daves made films where the only subtext was unintentional.   As a result of Daves’s direction and Donahue’s “nice young man” blandness, A Summer Place is a pleasant film that never quite becomes a memorable one.

Still, just try to get that music out of your head…