2025 FILM SERIES: The Epic David Lean

Summertime (1955, 101min)

Christopher Llewellyn Reed, chair, film & moving image department, Stevenson University

Katharine Hepburn was 47 years old—essentially senior-citizen territory for a screen actress in 1955—when she starred in Summertime as Jane Hudson, a single American woman in middle age who travels to Venice in search of love and adventure. Given how vibrant Hepburn is in every scene, it’s almost hard to accept her as a lonely spinster, but her performance draws you in and demonstrates Lean’s acute sensitivity to the plight of an older woman who can’t be pegged as wife or mother. An adaptation of Arthur Laurents’ 1953 play, The Time of the Cuckoo, the movie follows Jane as she meets a local man, Renato (a dazzlingly suave Rossano Brazzi), who, much to her delight—and terror—pursues her. Though the ultimate result of the affair takes a different direction than Jane initially thinks it might, the experience still proves life-altering for her. Summertime serves as a perfect transition from Lean’s earlier, England-bound work to the later international settings.

The summer film series is created in partnership with The Renaissance Institute.

$10 fee for guests or $40 for six films (No fee for ASG/RI members, or ASG subscribers)