The Screengrab

Summer is one of my favorite times to see a movie.  Growing up in Arizona in the shadows of a shopping mall, going to the multiplex on a hot summer day when I didn't have school and wanted to kill a few dozen brain cells out of the blinding sun and wilting heat was one of my absolute favorite things to do.  Let the cool kids go show off by the swimming pool:  for me it was the air-conditioned comfort and the fulfilling fantasies of the silver screen.  This summer, in between checking out what's new in the world of blockbusters and indie flicks of today, I'll be bringing you a mini-review of 15 'summer' movies of the past, judged by criteria I made up the other day over a couple of watermelon margaritas.  They won't always be good movies, but they'll always bring you a certain summery je ne sais quoi.

Let's start with one of the most famous summer flicks of all time:  1959's A Summer Place.

THE ACTION:  Rich toff Richard Egan totes his snobby, moralistic wife (Constance Ford) and pouty, vine-ripe teenage daughter to a New England resort.  The owner of the resort is grungy failed capitalist Arthur Kennedy and his lovely lady Dorothy McGuire, who run the joint alongside their dimwitted but hunky son, Troy Donahue.  Twenty years prior, Egan had a little thang-thang going with McGuire, and as everyone goes about their summer business, the two rekindle their hot and heavy relationship, as their hormone-crazed children follow suit.  This being the 1950s and all, Ford completely flips out, a shameful divorce takes place, a pregnancy scare ensues, and everyone looks at each other very meaningfully while wearing not particularly revealing swimwear.  You got all that?

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This week's That Gal! accomplishes something that we get to do all too infrequently in this feature:  profile a character actor from the Golden Age of Hollywood that we're lucky enough to still have with us.  Celeste Holm was born in New Jersey at the height of the First World War, but didn't attain fame on the motion picture screen until after the Second:  the daughter of a painter and a Norwegian insurance salesman (whose sharp Nordic features were reflected in his daughter's own face) worked on Broadway for over a decade, including a long and celebrated stint as the lead in the original run of Oklahoma!, before she was signed to an exclusive contract with 20th Century Fox in 1946.

She made an immediate impact in a number of supporting roles, establishing herself as one of the few women attractive enough to carry a lead performance but strong enough as an actress to inhabit challenging character parts.  The majority of her dozens of films, however, were made in the 1950s, before Holm realized that the acting she loved first was the acting she loved best:  despite a star-studded and highly decorated career on the silver screen, she far preferred stage acting, and returned to it almost exclusively in the 1960s and 1970s, occasionally doing television work to pay the bills before heading back to the footlights.

The 1980s saw a mini-career renaissance for the tony, aristocratic actress, and age had diminished her acting chops not a whit:  younger viewers got their first glimpse of her when she appeared in the wildly popular domestic comedy Three Men and a Baby in 1987.  She hasn't made a movie in several years, but she's hardly stood idle; she's touring with a one-woman theatrical show, she's won a lawsuit against Pedro Almodovar for unauthorized use of her image, and, in grand Hollywood tradition, she's moved on to her fifth husband, an opera singer almost 50 years her junior.  Now that's showbiz!

Where to see Celeste Holm at her best:

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