Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1959)

Director:

Leslie Norman

Writers:

John Dighton (writer)
Ray Lawler (play)

Release Date:

16 December 1961 (USA)

Genre:

Comedy | Drama

Plot:

Plot Keywords:

Australia | Sugarcane | Friendship | Based On Play

Cast

Ernest Borgnine	...	Roo
Anne Baxter	...	Olive
John Mills	...	Barney
Angela Lansbury	...	Pearl
Vincent Ball	...	Dowd
Ethel Gabriel	...	Emma
Janette Craig	...	Bubba
Deryck Barnes	...	Bluey
Tom Lurich	...	The Atom Bomber
Al Thomas	...	Spriuker
Dana Wilson	...	The Bomber's Daughter
Al Garcia	...	Dino
Frank Wilson	...	Vince
Jessica Noad	...	Nancy

Also Known As:

Season of Passion (USA)
Summer of the 17th Doll (UK) (alternative spelling)

Runtime:

93 min

Country:

Australia | UK | USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Sound Mix:

Mono (Westrex Recording System)

Certification:

UK:A | Finland:K-12 | Sweden:15 | USA:Approved

Filming Locations:

Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Company:

Hill-Hecht-Lancaster Productions

Movie Connections:

Referenced in Cane Cutter (2008)

Must have seemed like a good idea at the time

Many years ago I unwisely took part in an amateur production of Thornton Wilder's "The Matchmaker". I can still hear the mayhem created by those of us who tried, and failed miserably, to achieve an American accent and those (including, bizarrely, a stray Welshman) who just gave up and spoke their native idiom. Luckily out home-town audience was very forgiving and the local rag took pity on us.

This dire experience came back to me when I saw "Summer of the Seventeenth Doll", but even so, not having seen the original stage play by Ray Lawler, I didn't realise how badly it had been butchered until I saw a TV performance by the Melbourne Theatre Company. The first reaction of an Australian audience will be to switch off because of the hilarious mangling of their native speech by an all-star cast who deserved better and would have been more gainfully employed on another project. Maybe that wouldn't matter to a foreign audience, but then again, perhaps the resultant strange mixture of assorted Cockney, Bronx and other sounds would have a subtly disturbing effect on any listener.

Of more concern is the fact that the play's essence can't be divorced from its Australian roots, which include deceptively dry, laconic and understated speech cadences, without making it pretty meaningless. In fact it's the very antithesis of the overwrought, borderline- histrionic style of "serious" Hollywood films of the era. Anyone less like a laconic Queensland canecutter than the furiously emoting Ernest Borgnine would be hard to imagine. And switching the location from Melbourne to more photogenic Sydney settings, while trivial in itself, is symptomatic of the filmmakers' imperfect understanding of their vehicle.

I don't know that "Doll" is a great play, but it is a good one. However, given the need for some audience-pulling names there was no real prospect of doing it properly in 1959. The accent problem, which is just part of the underlying cultural mismatch, is not to be dismissed, and I've never heard an American or British actor come close to a convincing Australian accent - even Meryl Streep. Even nowadays, with many high-visibility Australians in Hollywood, it would be a problematic vehicle because at bottom it's pretty stagy. It's just one of those movies that shouldn't have been made.