The New Pictures

A Summer Place (Warner), based on the 1958 bestseller by Sloan Wilson, tells a story about two families who spend a summer together on an island off the coast of Maine. The first family is Back Bay Boston, gone to shirtsleeves; the second family is Upstate New York, rolling in revenue. The second family pays room and board to the first family, which is too poor to refuse the money but too proud to enjoy taking it.

Anyway, the air, as somebody remarks, is frightfully aphrodisiacal, and pretty soon the place turns into "a perverted Garden of Eden." Wife No. 1 (Dorothy McGuire) and Husband No. 2 (Richard Egan), who had been lovers in their teens, fall in love again, and one night they slip off to the old boathouse together. Meanwhile, Egan's daughter (Sandra Dee) and McGuire's son (Troy Donahue), both in their teens, wreck a sailboat and spend the night on a deserted beach. When Husband No. 1 (Arthur Kennedy) and Wife No. 2 (Constance Ford) wake up to what has been going on, they sue for divorces, demand custody of the children, pack them off to school by the first train. The adulterers get married and live happily ever after in a house that Frank Lloyd Wright built.

The End? Not at all. Having demonstrated the various advantages of adultery, the film goes on to make it clear to the movie audience that sexual dalliance between unmarried adolescents is really quite all right, provided they are in love and are willing to confess all to their parents and stand up in church when the girl gets pregnant.

The picture has been expertly written, directed and produced by an old Hollywood smoothie named Delmer (Destination Tokyo, Kings Go Forth) Daves, but unfortunately Daves's taste is not equal to his technique. Up to a point the story argues for a healthy relativity in morals. But the relativity of A Summer Place is anchored to no absolutes. The film treats adultery as casually as if there were nothing at all holy about matrimony. And along with moral sensitivity, the film lacks social responsibility. The adolescent love scenes are an inflammation to imitation.

The Mouse That Roared (Highroad; Columbia). One day at the height of the silly season, H.R.H. the Grand Duchess Gloriana XII of the Duchy of Grand Fenwick graciously declares that a state of war exists between Grand Fenwick and the United States of America. When the declaration is delivered to the U.S. Department of State, the only reaction it gets is a tired snicker from a bored bureaucrat: "Those guys in the pressroom. All the time making jokes." After all, Grand Fenwick is the smallest independent country in the world, a few square miles left over from the Middle

Ages in the midst of modern Europe, and it would hardly dare to attack the United States with the military resources at its command: a standing army of 20 mailclad bowmen.

So of course the note turns out to be no joke, and one fine sunny day, during an air-raid drill, an ocean-going tug chugs past the Statue of Liberty, and 20 mailclad bowmen make a beachhead in lower Manhattan. They move inland through deserted streets and occupy a scientific institute--where, as it happens, Dr. Alfred Kokintz, the great physicist, is putting the final touches to the Q-bomb, a football-shaped object that will erase an area of 2,000,000 square miles if it ever explodes. The bowmen capture the bomb and the man who made it, take them back home. Fenwick, they announce, has won the war.

Horror and consternation reign in the daffy duchy, whose rulers had not intended to win the war at all but to lose it. The whole object was to get rich quick on U.S. appropriations for war relief.

The Mouse gets out of this narrative trap, but in the process its tail end is somewhat mangled. Up to that point, though, the Roger MacDougall-Stanley Mann script is a fairly witty example of a rare film form: political burlesque. It keeps the show bouncing along despite a director (Jack Arnold) and a star (Peter Sellers, a sort of second-company Alec Guinness playing several roles) who have not mastered the light-fantastic style that suits and supports this sort of flimsy British whimsy.

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