![]() ![]() ![]() She begs Mauro to take her home to the Pensione Fiorini. Jane is humiliated when she accidentally steps backward into a canal while filming de Rossi's shop. The next morning, Jane returns to the shop with Mauro, and is disappointed to discover that Renato is not there. Hoping to see her again, Renato offers to search for a matching goblet. He assures her that the goblet is an authentic 18th-century artifact, and she purchases it after he teaches her the art of bargaining. Upon entering the shop, she discovers that the owner, Renato de Rossi, is the man from whom she had fled the night before. The following day, Jane goes shopping and sees a red glass goblet in the window of an antiques store. While seated at an outdoor caffè, she becomes aware of a lone Italian man watching her panicking, she quickly leaves. On her first evening in Venice, Jane walks to the Piazza San Marco, where the sight of so many romantic couples intensifies her loneliness. Jane is pestered off and on during her stay by Mauro, a friendly Italian street urchin. Also staying at the property are Eddie Yaeger, a young American painter, and his wife Phyl. ![]() At the hotel, they are greeted by Signora Fiorini, a widow who has converted her home into a pensione. On the vaporetto to her hotel, she meets two fellow Americans, Lloyd and Edith McIlhenny. Va bene.Jane Hudson is an unmarried, middle-aged, self-described "fancy secretary" from Akron, Ohio, on her summer vacation, enjoying her lifelong dream of a trip to Venice after having saved money for it over several years. But as in that earlier film, the art, craft and emotion have aged beautifully. Notions like the repressed American spinster’s awakening in the hands of the appreciative Italian lover may be as dated as the self-denial of Brief Encounter. The seductiveness of Venice makes an inevitability of the love affair with married Rossano Brazzi (also giving a wonderful, feeling performance) - whose face, when he first appears sitting behind Jane and checks her out from ankle to nape at a café in the vibrant Piazza San Marco, is a superb, classic sketch of the practiced Italian stud. She’s also a mistress of comic timing, including taking a memorable tumble into a Venetian canal (which gave her an eye infection that plagued her for the rest of her life). Miss Jane Hudson from Akron, Ohio, is an independent woman of a certain age (Hepburn was 48 at the time) who has saved for years to visit Europe, soak up culture, buy cheaper stuff and, just perhaps, look for a mysterious something else in life.Īlways a believer in pictures over words, Lean has a finely tuned instrument in La Hepburn, whose slender, elegant frame vibrates with loneliness and longing as she subtly observes the relationships, mating rituals and companionship of couples and couplings all around her. Summertime (first released in the UK with the not inappropriate title Summer Madness) is a charmer from the opening credits, a series of witty paintings depicting a redheaded woman, artwork and sound effects conveying impressions of her journey from New York to London and Paris before a train (a trademark Lean long shot) approaches the Venice lagoon. It, too, deals delicately with an adulterous temptation, but with considerably more joy and somewhat less guilt (plus, woo hoo, some actual sex) than the decent, agonised, stiff-upper-lipped British protagonists of the earlier film enjoy. Bates and Lean from Arthur (West Side Story) Laurents’ play The Time Of The Cuckoo, can definitely be seen as a companion piece to Brief Encounter. It may come as a surprise, then, to learn that the film reputed to be Lean’s own favourite was the comparatively neglected 1955 gem Summertime, a romantic drama starring Katharine Hepburn at the height of her powers and Venice, never more bewitchingly filmed than by cinematographer Jack Hildyard (an Oscar-winner for Bridge On The River Kwai). Bridge On The River Kwai, Doctor Zhivago and Oliver Twist also showed strongly. Brief Encounter, Lawrence Of Arabia and Great Expectations made up three of the nation’s Top Five when the BFI compiled Britain’s 100 Favourite Films Of The 20th Century. Selecting just one favourite David Lean film is like choosing which child to save. ![]()
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