The Screengrab

Summer is one of my favorite times to see a movie.  Growing up in Arizona in the shadows of a shopping mall, going to the multiplex on a hot summer day when I didn't have school and wanted to kill a few dozen brain cells out of the blinding sun and wilting heat was one of my absolute favorite things to do.  Let the cool kids go show off by the swimming pool:  for me it was the air-conditioned comfort and the fulfilling fantasies of the silver screen.  This summer, in between checking out what's new in the world of blockbusters and indie flicks of today, I'll be bringing you a mini-review of 15 'summer' movies of the past, judged by criteria I made up the other day over a couple of watermelon margaritas.  They won't always be good movies, but they'll always bring you a certain summery je ne sais quoi.

Let's start with one of the most famous summer flicks of all time:  1959's A Summer Place.

THE ACTION:  Rich toff Richard Egan totes his snobby, moralistic wife (Constance Ford) and pouty, vine-ripe teenage daughter to a New England resort.  The owner of the resort is grungy failed capitalist Arthur Kennedy and his lovely lady Dorothy McGuire, who run the joint alongside their dimwitted but hunky son, Troy Donahue.  Twenty years prior, Egan had a little thang-thang going with McGuire, and as everyone goes about their summer business, the two rekindle their hot and heavy relationship, as their hormone-crazed children follow suit.  This being the 1950s and all, Ford completely flips out, a shameful divorce takes place, a pregnancy scare ensues, and everyone looks at each other very meaningfully while wearing not particularly revealing swimwear.  You got all that?

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Up until now, the "No, But I've Read the Movie" has focused on great works of western literature, and assessed the movie versions to see if they can possibly stand up to the titanic reputations of the novels upon which they are based.  That ends today!  For today, we will focus on one of the most successful, and yet overrated and overblown, works of the western canon:  Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.  It's a novel that helped launch her career as one of the preeminent authors and philosophers of our time, but as a novel, it's hokey, overlong, bloated, and filled with characters one dimension short of being one-dimensional; and as philosophy, it's incomplete, inconsistent, and unable to look past its own epistemological shortcomings.  Rand's ideology of Objectivism became hugely popular, just as her novels became huge best-sellers, but whereas most literary adaptations were doomed to failure because what makes a great novel rarely makes a great movie, anyone daring to tackle her endlessly preachy books would be faced with the prospect of improving on the original, rather than dumbing it down for the format.  Given the runaway success of The Fountainhead -- Rand's story of an incorruptible architect who refuses to compromise his craft to satisfy the demands of the masses -- it was inevitable that there would be a film adaptation.  The question is, how would it handle such a patently unworkable premise and fundamentally unbelievable storyline?

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