Alexander says: “My favorite of all David Lean films, this one shows us romantic Venice through the eyes of a lonely American spinster. Full of solitude and longing, SUMMERTIME inspired my segment of PARIS JE T’AIME.”

“In David Lean’s SUMMERTIME, in which Rossano Brazzi seduces Katharine Hepburn—an aging, repressed Ohio ‘working girl’ on vacation in Venice—the Continental lover reached his pinnacle and approached his end. In the next decade, he would be embodied by Marcello Mastroianni, who was too cynical and self-disgusted to take the role seriously. By then, even Mastroianni himself knew the game was up. And by the ’70s, no filmmaker could get away with the premise that Americans needed Europeans for sensual instruction. In 1955, however, the conventions of the formula were still very much in place, and SUMMERTIME, directed with superb confidence by David Lean, proved to be a popular addition to the long-running idiom (perhaps best exemplified by 1942’s NOW, VOYAGER).” — David Denby