The David Lean movie Martin Scorsese called “exquisite”
While Martin Scorsese is rightfully considered one of the most influential and significant directors to ever sit in the chair, that has never stopped him from being a student of cinema with a deep passion for the medium. In that light, the film icon has never stopped short of offering his praise or criticism of his fellow filmmakers, providing quality reviews and opinions.
Scorsese has gone on record several times over the years to discuss some of his favourite filmmakers, including Federico Fellini, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, Michelangelo Antonioni and Abbas Kiarostami. He’s also provided his glowing assessments of some of the filmmakers that have come after him, such as Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson.
But one director that Scorsese fans may have never heard him speak of is the highly important English filmmaker, producer and screenwriter David Lean, who’s mostly known for directing big-scale epic films like The Bridge of the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago. While those films are indeed admired almost universally, Scorsese once picked out one of Lean’s lesser-known movies.
In 1955, Lean started to make internationally co-produced movies with big studios in Hollywood, starting with Summertime, starring Katharine Hepburn, Rossano Brazzi, Darren McGavin and Isa Miranda. Per an archived review of Scorsese, he claimed that it served as Lean’s last “small” film before he went to work on The Bridge on the River Kwai.
While the scale is smaller in Summertime, for Scorsese, it still “has the same grandeur, the same exquisite grasp of place and climate and time of year and of the way that atmosphere affects consciousness.” The film focuses on a lonely American secretary who takes a tour of Venice on her own before falling in love with an Italian antique dealer.
Venice, according to Scorsese, “itself becomes a principal character and exerts a strange influence on Hepburn’s mood, lighter and magical, though mysterious.”
He added: “Her wanderings through the city open her up, expose her emotional frailties and yearnings.”
Signing off his review, Scorsese wrote: “Every image in this film is painstakingly realized (Summertime was, and still is, one of the most beautiful pictures ever shot on location in Technicolor, and it is long overdue for a real restoration), and the last scene is best described as a poem of emotion, light and distance. This is a stunning film and an equally stunning collaboration between a great actress and a great director.”
Check out the trailer for David Lean’s Summertime below.
