Summer Storm (1944)
Directed by Douglas Sirk

Film Review

Douglas Sirk's second Hollywood feature - after Hitler's Madman (1943) - has little of the passion and stylistic brilliance of the Technicolor melodramas that the director would make in the 1950s but it is an important milestone in his career, his first notable success in America.  Sirk had intended adapting Anton Chekhov's 1884 novel The Shooting Party back in the days when he was working at UFA, but it wasn't until he migrated to America that he was able to fulfil this ambition.  Summer Storm is reasonably faithful to Chekhov's novel, although the period in which the story is set is time-shifted to just before and after the Russian Revolution.  It isn't clear why Sirk opted to make this change although it does provide the film with a suitably dramatic ending.

Although the film's budgetary constraints are a little too obvious (some of the set design is positively shoddy) and its pace encumbered by a lacklustre script, Summer Storm redeems itself through its central performances from George Sanders and Linda Darnell.  Forever remembered as the consummate English cad, Sanders gives a surprisingly sympathetic portrayal here as a man who tries and fails to get a grip on his immoral tendencies.  The part of Petrov could have been created for Sanders, an actor who is at his best when playing conflicted, ambiguous characters whom we cannot decide whether to love or hate.  Sirk was so impressed with Sanders that, after this first collaboration, he would employ him on several of his subsequent films, including A Scandal in Paris (1946) and Lured (1947).

With her career going nowhere, Linda Darnell lobbied hard to get the role of the social-climbing temptress Olga, the first in a long line of sultry femme fatales that would make her a Hollywood icon.  Darnell's sizzling screen presence - particularly noticeable in her scenes with Sanders - suddenly brings the film to life and prevents it from being a sluggish period melodrama.  Edward Everett Horton was a brave choice for the part of Count Volsky, and whilst he is more at home with comedy he also impresses with an ambiguous portrayal that effectively shows up the nobility in Sanders' equally flawed character.  Anna Lee is woefully underused but makes her presence felt, particularly in the scenes that bookend the main part of the narrative.  Summer Storm may have been a critical and commercial success when it was released but it is now somewhat overshadowed by Sirk's subsequent work and remains a relatively minor entry in his remarkable filmography.

Film Synopsis

In 1919, not long after the Russian Revolution, publisher Nadena Kalenin receives a visit from Count Volsky, a once wealthy aristocrat who has become impoverished by the revolution.  Volsky presents Nadena with a manuscript written by a mutual acquaintance, Fedor Petrov, who was once an important magistrate.  In his book, Petrov recounts events that took place seven years previously, during a hot summer that ended in tragedy.  This was when Petrov and Nadena first met and fell in love.  But within a short time of their getting engaged, Petrov's attention was drawn to another woman, a seductive peasant girl named Olga.  Despite her protestations that she is in love with Petrov, Olga chooses to marry a man from her class, the farmer Urbenin.   Not long after her wedding, Olga has begun another affair, with Count Volsky.  One sunny day, Olga is found dead, stabbed by a knife given to her by Volsky.  Her husband is the obvious culprit but for some reason Petrov is reluctant to see him prosecuted for the crime...