A Summer Story Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		3.0
Audio		2.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.0

A Summer Story Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Dr. Stephen Larson March 27, 2018

With the passage of the National Heritage Acts of 1980 and 1983, the British people gained greater access to the commodification, exhibition, and display of the heritage industry, which promotes contemporary tourism and service industries. Motion pictures inextricably became part of this industrial platform. Indeed, from the early eighties onward, British heritage films—many of them literary adaptations made by the triumvirate of screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, producer Ismail Merchant, and director James Ivory—arrived in the international marketplace when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's England and other countries underwent a capitalist recession. Film scholar Andrew Higson has noted that "heritage" connotes stabilization with the past and a preservation of traditions and values. Higson characterizes heritage cinema as a quality costume drama set in the imperial past of upper-class England. Prominent heritage films that Higson cites include include Hugh Hudson's Chariots of Fire (1981), Marek Kanievska's Another Country (1984), David Lean's A Passage to India (1984), Charles Sturridge's A Handful of Dust (1988), Christine Edzard's Little Dorrit (1988), and two Merchant Ivory E.M. Forster adaptations: A Room with a View (1986) and Maurice (1987).

Piers Haggard's A Summer Story (1988) followed in the same lineage but was less popular commercially and certainly not as well-known as its predecessors. While it starred Heritage Cinema alum James Wilby, the film was not widely seen or as well received in Britain as some of the more celebrated films in the genre. In the US, it played in Los Angeles, New York, and around fifty big cities, according to film critic Lee Siegel. The movie was well-received by critics but it likely did not have either the production budget or the marketing power to compete with the higher profile titles. The Observer (UK) reported that scribe Penelope Mortimer (Bunny Lake Is Missing; The Pumpkin Eater) began work on her screenplay in 1968 but it didn't get the green light to go forward until two decades henceforth. (She hardly remembered any of the material until dusting off her script.)

Megan and Frank want to hold on to each other...but for how long?

Based on John Galsworthy's 1916 novella The Apple Tree, A Summer Story is narrated by Wilby's Frank Ashton, a barrister who returns to a farmhouse in Devonshire many years after he first took refuge in 1904. Frank reminisces how, trekking across the meadow in Dartmoor with his braggadocios friend, he got his ankle caught in a fence stile. Fortunately, Frank is close by the Narracombe farm where Mrs. Narracombe (Susannah York) and Jim the farmhand (Kenneth Colley) treat the injured lad. Also staying there is shepherdess Megan David (Imogen Stubbs), who the Narracombes have adopted. The instant liking that Frank takes to Megan soon turns into a smoldering passion that is mutual. A Summer Story develops into a soap opera as Mrs. Narracombe's son, Joe (Jerome Flynn), believes that he's destined to be Megan's lover and permanent suitor. Wilby is fine in his role here but he tries too hard to earn the audience's sympathy. He already has earned it but Mortimer and Haggard belabor that point. Further, Joe is so possessive of Megan that the audience yearns for her to leave with Frank. But Mrs. Narracombe lets her guest know that it is only he that must depart the farm.

A Summer Story becomes more of a heritage film when Frank ventures off to Torquay. In town he is approached by an old school classmate and his sister. Frank is caught between his passion for Megan and the privileges as well as accoutrements offered by the Edwardian upper class. Bound by the class position he has re-assumed, Frank makes a fateful decision that affects himself, Megan, and his future family life.

A Summer Story Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

I waited many years for A Summer Story to reach DVD which it finally did in 2014. Like the SD disc, this Blu-ray from Scorpion Releasing presents the movie in 1.78:1, which has been altered from its 1.85:1 theatrical aspect ratio. Scorpion states that this is a "brand new 2017 HD scan of the original vault elements." Fans who owned the VHS will surely note the superior colors in this transfer. The image is very bright during day-lit scenes and a bit soft but this is probably due to the eighties-era film stock. And while this may in fact be a new scan, there is quite a bit of damage throughout which makes it look like a theatrical print run through the projector one too many times. The screenshots shown in this review belie the numerous instance of white speckles, cigarette burns, reel-change marks, and blips. They aren't always constant but they creep in the frames pretty often. Black levels are quite deep but the image exude some video noise. Scorpion has used the MPEG-4 AVC video encode. The picture's transfer averages a bitrate of 28779 kbps. There may be some improvements in this transfer compared to the DVD but there's still a lot to clean up.

Scorpion has divided the 95-minute feature into thirteen chapter breaks.

A Summer Story Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

In a very perplexing decision, Scorpion has encoded only a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Dual Mono mix (2007 kbps, 24-bit). The film apparently did receive a stereo mix for cinema exhibition back in '88 and Scorpion's DVD was even rendered in Dolby Stereo. I had to turn the volume up on my Onkyo to a very loud pitch in order to hear the British dialogue clearly, even in more confined settings like the Narracombe's house interiors. Scorpion doesn't even include any subtitles or captions.

It was as a devotee of George Delerue's music that I first learned about A Summer Story so I was eager to hear how the score was used in the film. It fares better than the actors' voices along the front speakers but I have would preferred to hear it in a multimix track or in LPCM 2.0 stereo. As for the music, Delerue was one of the cinema's great romantics and A Summer Story was a fine match for his wonderful gift for creating sweeping and heartrending melodies. The original soundtrack album release by Virgin Records was very hard to come by during the DVD era but I was lucky to procure a copy. Music Box Records re-released an expanded CD of the score in early 2017 (a wonderful package) but the limited edition has become very scarce.

Some movie reviewers didn't like the film's elegiac tone and put the blame on Delerue's hand, including Desmond Ryan of The Philadelphia Inquirer: "from the first dolorous phrases of the cello in Georges Delerue's shamelessly romantic score, A Summer Story strikes the wrong note." Interestingly, two media critics for Australia's The Age had opposite reactions to the score. Neil Jillett: "Georges Delerue has non-stop cellos groaning away on the soundtrack." Contrast that with Jim Murphy's take: "the overall effect [of the first CD release] should be very satisfying to Delerue fans. He writes superbly for strings, and no track ls lovelier than 'Ashton Arrives,' a beautiful theme for cello."

A Summer Story Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Scorpion Releasing Trailers - a bevy of trailers for Scorpion's catalog titles play in succession but this doesn't include A Summer Story!

A Summer Story Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

A Summer Story is a fairly standard English romantic period drama that is smaller and more melancholic than other British Heritage Cinema titles of the era. Scorpion Releasing's Blu-ray is very average. While the color temperature has been corrected, there are still a ton of film artifacts that require a frame-by-frame restoration. The lossless sound track is extremely limited and disappointing. Hopefully, a UK label will put out an upgraded edition. Still, I'm glad that it's finally on BD and I do RECOMMEND it to fellow fans of Wilby, Delerue, and classic British films.