WARNER BROTHERS ROMANCE CLASSICS

This is a curiously bland title for a fascinating boxed set of four films
that functions at once as a tribute to a forgotten star, a treatise on an
overlooked director and a study of American sexual mores on the threshold of
change.
The four films in the collection — “Parrish” (1961), “Susan
Slade” (1961), “Rome
Adventure” (1962) and “Palm
Springs Weekend” (1963) — all feature Troy
Donahue, a sandy-haired heartthrob whom most audiences remember only
indistinctly today. (He’s the one who’s not Tab
Hunter.) But for a few years, between the release of the hugely successful
“Summer Place” in 1959 and the disastrous “My
Blood Runs Cold” in 1965, Donahue’s broad-shouldered, self-serious presence
dominated the fan magazines and the dreams of countless American teenage girls.
If Elvis had a rival, it was in the unlikely form of this somber, slow-moving
young man, whose blond forelock and clear blue eyes represented the nice-boy
alternative to Presley’s aggressive sexuality.
“A
Summer Place,” like three of the four films in this set, was directed by
Delmer Daves, a Hollywood veteran who had already established a reputation for
morally complex war films (the excellent “Pride
of the Marines,” 1945) and socially progressive westerns. (His 1950 “Broken
Arrow” helped to introduce the issue of racism in postwar American movies,
in what was widely if inaccurately regarded as the first “pro-Indian” film.)
The only clues in Daves’s filmography to his latent talent as a melodramatist
lie among his credits as a screenwriter: four scripts for Frank
Borzage, including the outstanding “Stranded” (1935), as well as a contribution to Leo
McCarey’s sublime “Love
Affair” (1939), which McCarey himself remade as “An
Affair to Remember” in 1957.
The success of “A Summer Place” shifted Daves’s career from the Howard
Hawks-John
Ford realm of the masculine action movie to the Douglas
Sirk-Vincente
Minnelli axis of the so-called “women’s picture” — a transformation with few
parallels in film history. (Daves’s son, Michael Daves, has said that the shift
was precipitated partly by health problems: his father had a heart attack in
1958 and, on his doctors’ advice, decided to limit himself to less strenuous,
studio-based projects.)
The virtues of Daves’s late romances are essentially the same as those of his
adventure films: characters composed with the utmost integrity and respect; a
gift for creating a detailed and convincing social background; and a strong,
clear narrative style that allowed him to manage a large cast of characters and
several simultaneous levels of dramatic events.
In their influential book “50 Ans de Cinéma Américain” (available only in
French) Bertrand
Tavernier and Jean-Pierre Coursodon, perhaps Daves’s most passionate
critical supporters, described his commitment to his increasingly soap-operatic
subjects as “suicidally conscientious.” And Daves certainly does take risks by
treating material like “Susan Slade” seriously, where Douglas Sirk would have
signaled his superiority to the material with his crafty distancing devices.
There is no apparent distancing in “A Summer Place,” a full-throttle
melodrama that compares and contrasts two love affairs: an innocent first
romance played out between young people (Sandra
Dee and Donahue) and a guilty, adulterous affair between the girl’s father
(Richard Egan) and the boy’s mother (Dorothy McGuire). “Broken Arrow” may have
brought down some barriers, but “A Summer Place” (which Warner released on DVD
in 2007) helped to redefine the way sex was portrayed in American movies.
Daves not only suggested actual physical relations between the lovers, but
also went to the scandalous length of condemning the sexual hypocrisy of the
older generation while suggesting that teenage sex was natural and healthy (if
still likely to lead to consequences). More so than Mark Robson’s lurid and
moralistic “Peyton
Place” (1957), Daves’s film opened the way to “adult” themes in Hollywood
films, just as the sexual revolution was breaking in popular novels and
magazines.
The formula was too effective not to be repeated, and Daves elaborated the
basic themes over three more films. Connie Stevens stepped in for Dee in the
ambitious “Parrish,” set against the unusual and vividly rendered background of
tobacco farming in Connecticut, and joined Donahue again for the least
satisfying film in the series, the contrived and uneven “Susan Slade.”
Daves ended his Donahue period with perhaps the best film of the bunch, “Rome
Adventure,” with Suzanne
Pleshette (in her first leading role) as a New England schoolteacher who
travels to Europe in search of experience — and finds it with Donohue, as an
earnest architecture student.
To an America that needed to believe that “nice girls don’t,” Daves’s
melodramas responded, “Nice girls do” — or did at least sometimes, when the
appropriate distinctions had been made between lust and love, predatory older
males and sincere young men, casual encounters and lifetime commitments.
The sobriety and sensitivity of Daves’s work is underlined by the fourth film
in the Warner set, “Palm Springs Weekend,” a slapstick sex farce broadly
directed by the old comedy hand Norman Taurog, taking a break from his Elvis
vehicles (“Girls!
Girls! Girls!,” etc.).
Amid the juvenile high jinks of “Palm Springs Weekend,” Donahue already looks
dissipated and disaffected, and, indeed, he was sliding into an alcoholic
depression. His teenage fans were moving on (and about to discover four new
dreamboats from Liverpool), and he failed to establish a more adult appeal, in
spite of credible work in what would prove to be Raoul
Walsh’s last film, “A
Distant Trumpet” (1964).
His career slipped into exploitation films, and by the time Francis
Ford Coppola lifted him from obscurity for a brief role in “The Godfather:
Part II” (he appears as Connie’s fiancé, Merle Johnson — which was Donahue’s
real name), he seemed like a page out of “Hollywood
Babylon,” the walking embodiment of damaged celebrity. In 2001 he died of a
heart attack at 65.
Daves made one more melodrama in this strain, the interesting “Youngblood
Hawke” (1964), with James Franciscus in a role that might have been
conceived for Donahue: an intense young novelist from Kentucky making his way
among the predators of Manhattan. After a final, minor effort, “The
Battle of the Villa Fiorita” (1965), Daves retired, and died in 1977 at 73.
With several other highly accomplished films to his credit — among them “The
Red House” (1947), “Dark
Passage” (1947), “3:10
to Yuma” (1957) and “The
Hanging Tree” (1959), Daves remains among the most unfairly neglected of
American filmmakers; this fine small collection, produced with the care we’ve
come to expect from Warner Brothers, represents a blow for justice. (Warner Home Video, $39.92, not rated)