Sunday, March 01, 2009

We'll Always Have Venice

Working its way to the top of the Netflix queue: Summertime, by David Lean, with Katherine Hepburn in supercharged spinster mode. A skim of the sources suggests that she (or he) ran second for a whole showcase full of major awards (behind Richard III, Rose Tattoo and Marty--details here), and that is probably no accident: with luminaries like these, you've got to be in the running but it isn't, at the end of the day, a very good movie. Lean does what he does best--respond to the environment, as he does later with India or Arabia. Hepburn is on safe ground, but it's almost a bit perfunctory, as if she had blown out all the gaskets in African Queen.

But what's most striking about the movie is how little Venice has changed in 50-plus years. Of course it is noisier and dirtier (and perhaps wetter) than it was a half century ago--but we can assume that a lot of the noise and the dirt was edited out of the early version anyway. Still, there is the train station, and the vaporetti, and San Marco and the Accademia and the little back-alley canals, and the faux antiques (there's even a ritual dropping-of-the-garbage, presumably just as much a part of Venice as a Bellini Madonna) (enthusiasts with a sincere tase for the dirt should turn to the mysteries of Donna Leon).

On reflection, though, it probably isn't just fifty years: more like five hundred and fifty--since 1453, when the Turks raged into Constantinople and Venice lost its commercial/imperial rationale. The city is, when you stop to think of it, the world's original tourist theme park, and cries out for Lean and Hepburn just as much as Disneyland cries out for Mickey and Minnie. Still, there's something about Venice that is so singular that not even snark and snide can kill it--and the same can be said, I suppose, about Hepburn and Lean.

Background: I know of one wonderful book about the culture of tourism in Venice: Robert C. Davis and Garry R. Marvin, Venice: The Tourist Maze (2004).

1 comment:

Toni said...

You probably know this, but although they may have edited Venice's dirt and filth out of "Summertime," Hepburn couldn't escape its effects. She fell into a canal during one of the shoots and contracted a skin condition that plagued her for the rest of her life (or so the story goes).

P.S. I love the Brunetti mysteries. I only discovered them because the late Anna Fields was the audiobook reader. (Anna died when a storm sent a flash flood into her basement recording studio in Seattle a few years ago -- it was like losing a good friend).