Summer Storm

Linda Darnell and Edward Everett Horton cut the cake in Summer Storm

Douglas Sirk's Summer Storm is a delightfully diabolical adaptation of Chekhov's only novel, The Shooting Party. Sirk, who had been working on the screenplay even before emigrating to America, transposes the melodrama from the 1840s to the revolutionary era. There are bookend sections set in 1919, with all the main characters in reduced circumstances, but the majority of the novel is set in 1912. Sirk captures Chekhov's ironic tone in telling the tale of a Russian peasant siren, Olga, who drives a large number of men in her local burg to their doom.

Linda Darnell entered into a new phase of her career with this picture, shifting from playing, as she put it, "sweet young things" to sexy femme fatales. Almost all of the posters advertising United Artists concocted for the picture features Darnell's gams with such pulpy copy as "She Devil", "Don't Go Near this Woman", and "She was an Invitation to Murder". The hype did the trick and the film was a moderate success, at least for a Chekhov adaptation. Sirk and cinematographer Archie Stout milk the most out of Darnell's physical charms. Traipsing around the California countryside in bare feet, Darnell gives the film some needed oomph. Stout's outdoor shots bestow to the film a tang of eroticism and sun dappled beauty. No one in Hollywood photographed horses as magnificently. Stout had had plenty of practice, shooting scores of B Westerns before graduating to A pictures such as Beau Geste and Fort Apache.

The erotic charge Darnell gives the film really helps because without her the picture sometimes seems to emanate from an English drawing room rather than the Russian steppes. Of course, one shouldn't complain when such stalwarts as George Sanders, Anna Lee, and Edward Everett Horton are in the cast. Horton, as Count "Piggy" Volsky, is the very embodiment of aristocratic fecklessness. Sanders plays the Count's friend, a local Judge. He is well-cast as the caddish magistrate who is engaged to Lee's publisher's daughter, but soon goes gaga over Olga. Sanders, born to Russian parents, even got to sing in his native language in a thrilling musical number. This precedes, if you are keeping score Sirk fans, the second of two key mirror shots in the film. 

Anna Lee seemed to be a perennial second female lead in Hollywood, but I would rate her a better actress than a large number of her co-stars with higher billing. Her best work is in numerous John Ford films, Tay Garnett's Seven Sinners, and Sam Fuller's The Crimson Kimono. 

Summer Storm contains the second most creepy Russian Orthodox wedding in cinematic history, besides The Scarlet Empress, and the reception that follows is comically ghastly. The print currently streaming on Tubi is murky, but you can still find better DVD versions. Sirk's other feature with Sanders, 1946's A Scandal in Paris, is even more delightful.