MoPoshy Absolutely brilliant

BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Kien Navarro Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Deanna There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

dbdumonteil Valerio Zurlini was first known for his melodramas ("la ragazza con la valigla" and "cronaca familiare" but his towering achievement was his final effort "il deserto dei Tartari" a brilliant adaptation of Dino Buzatti's masterpiece (hence not a melodrama)."Estate Violenta" is a moderately successful film:the umpteenth story of a young and attractive widow and a younger (not so younger by the way,Trintignant was actually about five years younger than Rossi-Drago)lad ,during the Fascist years .The boy has a lot of fun with his mates :thanks to his father who provides him protection he has avoided the draft.He spends his time ,with a spoiled youth sunbathing and partying but history is about to catch him up.Rossi-Drago portrays a woman who stifles in her bourgeois atmosphere.Excellent performances by the two leads.Gorgeous brunette Jacqueline Sassard is also featured as Trintignant's girlfriend (she would team up again with Trintignant in Chabrol's "les biches"(1967); nothing was heard from her since).Best scene:bombing of the railway station,Zurlini works wonders when he describes people's panic.

cranesareflying Jean-Louis Trintignat plays the draft-dodging son of a powerful Nazi in 1943 Italy, in a prelude to Bertolucci's "The Conformist," who falls in love with an older war widow, in an absolutely brilliant performance by Eleonora Rossi Drago, (what else has she ever been in?) featuring a brilliantly choreographed sequence to the song "Temptation," reminding me of Fassbinder's "The Bitter Tears of Petra Van Kant," this is one of the better scenes one is ever likely to see in all of cinema where the lovers dance and fall in love around a nude male statue oblivious to the war raging outside, similar to Oshima's "In the Realm of the Senses," there is an extraordinary pacing to the film, an intense love affair, reminiscent of Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in Hitchcock's "Notorious," this is a beautifully written, old-fashioned melodrama, the likes of which we just don't see any more.

JSL26 This love story set in a seaside town during Mussolini's Italy's last gasp has a lot of atmosphere and beautiful b/w cinematography, but the smoldering love story between the young J-L Trintignant and the initially reluctant older (30!) widow (the hauntingly beautiful Eleanora Rossi Drago--and why isn't she famous?)is convincing and memorable. See it if you can!

Aw-komon After being quite impressed by the near-masterpiece comedy Zurlini made in 1954 "The Girls of San Frediano," I was very much disappointed by "Violent Summer," an overly melodramatic soap-opera made 5 years later. Too bad Zurlini couldn't restrain himself from the melodramatic overstatements that ruin the film because the cinematography couldn't be better and the young Trintignant's performance is pretty amazing.