bkoganbing I read with some interest the comments by Aussie reviewers on this film before writing my own review. They seem to think the spirit of Ray Lawler's play was cut right of the film version of The Summer Of The 17th Doll. My own view just as it was the producer's choice to hire American and British leads it was also his choice to bow to American censor requirements and omnipresent Code still in force.I sympathize with the the Aussies who complain that one of their own should have been in the lead. Certainly Chips Rafferty who was the biggest name in Aussie cinema at the time could have taken Ernest Borgnine's part. He sure had the size for it.Summer Of The 17th Doll casts Borgnine and John Mills as a pair of sugar cane cutters who are now at liberty as the occupation is seasonal. Borgnine's size and strength make him respected while Mills reputation and identity come from his love 'em and leave 'em attitude with women. Both have their steady girls Anne Baxter and Angela Lansbury as anchors of a sort.But these two women are getting tired of being a pair of Adelaides for their Nathan Detroits. Plain and simple these two won't acknowledge they're not young any more. Plain and simple they won't grow up.And that's a universal situation not necessarily an Australian one. If Summer Of The 17th Doll were remade today I can see Nicole Kidman as one of the women and Guy Pearce as one of the men. And the Code restrictions would be off.Still while it's not all it could be, Summer Of the 17th Doll is a fine bit of film making.

ellgees I recently watched this movie, believing it was an important Australian contribution to the world of cinema. How wrong I was!It certainly is a well-known film, but perhaps that is only because of the play on which it is based received much publicity. Or perhaps because of its leading cast of well-known Hollywood etc stars.This movie, originally titled "Summer of the 17th Doll," was in my opinion very disappointing. Firstly, I found the sound so distorted it was difficult to understand the dialog. The accents, mentioned here by other reviewers, were deplorable, and I will never understand why Australian actors weren't used in an Australian working-class story. I suppose the producers wanted "big names" in the important roles, but as hard as they tried, most of the cast never sounded convincingly like Aussies, so all I heard was a changing jumble of false working- class English accents.The movie itself had some welcome humorous moments, if one could ignore the above comment, and the story line was interesting and believable. What was UNbelievable was the exaggerated and histrionic reactions of the characters to their every frustration. I expected more than melodrama from actors of this calibre.It could have been so much better.

Neil Cammack Many years ago I unwisely took part in an amateur production of Thornton Wilder's "The Matchmaker". I can still hear the mayhem created by those of us who tried, and failed miserably, to achieve an American accent and those (including, bizarrely, a stray Welshman) who just gave up and spoke their native idiom. Luckily out home-town audience was very forgiving and the local rag took pity on us.This dire experience came back to me when I saw "Summer of the Seventeenth Doll", but even so, not having seen the original stage play by Ray Lawler, I didn't realise how badly it had been butchered until I saw a TV performance by the Melbourne Theatre Company. The first reaction of an Australian audience will be to switch off because of the hilarious mangling of their native speech by an all-star cast who deserved better and would have been more gainfully employed on another project. Maybe that wouldn't matter to a foreign audience, but then again, perhaps the resultant strange mixture of assorted Cockney, Bronx and other sounds would have a subtly disturbing effect on any listener.Of more concern is the fact that the play's essence can't be divorced from its Australian roots, which include deceptively dry, laconic and understated speech cadences, without making it pretty meaningless. In fact it's the very antithesis of the overwrought, borderline- histrionic style of "serious" Hollywood films of the era. Anyone less like a laconic Queensland canecutter than the furiously emoting Ernest Borgnine would be hard to imagine. And switching the location from Melbourne to more photogenic Sydney settings, while trivial in itself, is symptomatic of the filmmakers' imperfect understanding of their vehicle.I don't know that "Doll" is a great play, but it is a good one. However, given the need for some audience-pulling names there was no real prospect of doing it properly in 1959. The accent problem, which is just part of the underlying cultural mismatch, is not to be dismissed, and I've never heard an American or British actor come close to a convincing Australian accent - even Meryl Streep. Even nowadays, with many high-visibility Australians in Hollywood, it would be a problematic vehicle because at bottom it's pretty stagy. It's just one of those movies that shouldn't have been made.

Kyle Rata I Have read the play and seen the film, Ray Lawler wrote the play extremely well. He did something interesting, in writing the play with accents. This is something i haven't seen before.Leslie Norman however did a poor adaptation of the text version, simple things like getting the city wrong that the play was set in and Australian accents. The accents were bad, the actors did not even seem to try to talk like an Australian. Ernest Borgnine was the main culprit. He had a full blown yank accent happening during the whole film.This film was a waste of my time, and a waste of everyone else's time who has ever watched it. I does not even deserve a 3 out of 10.