Trailer
Plot summary
Twenty years after he worked as a lifeguard on Pine Island off the Maine coast, Ken Jorgenson writes to the island's crumbling inn for a summer reservation. He is now a wealthy research chemist, arriving with his wife Helen and their daughter Molly. The inn is kept by Bart Hunter, whose drinking and failing business have worn down his wife Sylvia, and by Johnny, their teenage son. Bart would rather turn the request down, but Sylvia says they need the money. Ken and Sylvia were teenage sweethearts; Ken was then a poor college student, and Sylvia married Bart, the son of a wealthy family. Ken married Helen after reading of Sylvia's wedding. Both couples stay together for their children's sake, and on the island Molly and Johnny begin a romance of their own.
Cast
- Martin Ericas Todd Harper, Handyman at Pine Island Inn
Show all 20 cast
- Joe Connorsas Driver (uncredited)
- Peter Constantias Captain of Yacht (uncredited)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about A Summer Place (1959)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Max Steiner's "Theme from A Summer Place" was used in the film only as a secondary musical theme, yet Percy Faith's later rearrangement of it spent nine consecutive weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1960, a record at the time.
- The 1895 LaPorte Mansion, just outside downtown Pacific Grove, California, served as the Pine Island Inn in the film; a 2023 fire destroyed the historic building.
- The beach house of Ken (Richard Egan) and Sylvia (Dorothy McGuire) was filmed at Frank Lloyd Wright's Mrs. Clinton Walker House in Carmel-by-the-Sea, built in 1948; the film gives it a lower floor at beach level that the real single-story home, sitting on ledge rock above the tide line, does not have.
- Sloan Wilson's first screenplay for the adaptation of his own novel covered the book's 22-year span, so director Delmer Daves rewrote the draft to cover a single year.
