Product Details

• Format: Closed-captioned, Color, NTSC
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Hallmark
• VHS Release Date: February 27, 1996
• Run Time: 83 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 1574920324
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #138,441 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Holds your interests, March 14, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Summer House [VHS] (VHS Tape)

This movie is a mysterious little number starring Jeanne Moreau, an excellent French actress with many decades of remarkable work on her resume. She essentially carries the movie in a laughable, moving and over-the-top character. The story is a little confusing on first viewing (due to flashbacks to Egypt that are a little hard to follow, at first), but stick with it. If you like strong, repressed and hopeful characters mixed into a story of lost love and an expectation of a lackluster future that needs to be fought by a soon-to-be married woman, this might appeal to you. One reviewer expected Enchanted April and wrote a horrible review about this movie, based upon that expectation. The two movies are radically different, and that reviewer missed the mark. Recommendations given by Amazon that "if you like this, you might like that" do not mean to imply the movies are of the same exact nature. It only means to imply that it is of the same general format, like one mafia movie to another. Please ignore that negative review. It is completely without merit. Give this movie a try, if you can get it and especially if you enjoy the incomparable Jeanne Moreau.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars summer house, November 26, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Summer House [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Charming story of a friendship between an older woman with a past and a repressed younger woman who fears being trapped in a conventional life. The character Lily (Jeanne Moreau) is unforgettable. Excellent British cast. Similar in feeling to "Tea With Mussolini" and "Enchanted April".

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "I see God and Satan as an old married couple.", November 2, 2005

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Summer House (Clothes in the Wardrobe) (VHS Tape)

When Mother Joseph makes this statement to the nineteen-year-old Margaret, she could not have appreciated the irony that in just a few months, Margaret would be planning to marry Syl, a forty-year-old, pompous dolt whom she does not love. Emotionally devastated by something that happened to her in Egypt, where she recently spent six months, the devout Margaret is naïve and pliable, allowing her divorced mother Monica to make all the wedding plans. When a school friend of her mother's, the half-Egyptian Lili arrives for the wedding "festivities," she completely upsets the status quo but offers a lifeline to Margaret. Loud, flamboyant, colorful, and exhausting, Lili plans to give Margaret a wedding gift that she will never forget.

Based on Alice Thomas Ellis's trilogy, The Summer House, of which Clothes in the Wardrobe is the first novel (followed by Skeleton in the Cupboard and Fly in the Ointment), Director Waris Hussein's film captures the same wry tone and ironic humor for which Ellis's novels are noted. Here the contrasts between the characters, their expectations, and their attitudes are visual as well as verbal, with color playing a major role. The naïve and pliable Margaret (Lena Headey) wears gray throughout, and her mother Monica (Julie Walters) and Syl's mother (Joan Plowright) also wear dull, subdued colors, their homes reflecting the same color palettes. When their friend, the red-haired whirlwind named Lili arrives, she is full of color, wearing exotic jewelry, daring to be different, and delighting in shocking the staid community of Croyden.

Filmed on location in Egypt and the English countryside, the photography is gorgeous, contrasting the stultifying claustrophobia of Margaret's relationship with Syl and her life in Croyden, with the open vistas and erotic freedom she enjoyed in Egypt. Ellis's thematic exploration of love and sex, God and sin, and life and death is developed here through symbols, the characters' sometimes ironic references to the church and God, and through Margaret's sometimes unexplained nightmares and daydreams of her life in Egypt. (These play a major role in the book's conclusion, where they are resolved.)

Moreau, as Lily, is as flamboyant as it is possible to be, and she dominates the action in ways both amusing and thought-provoking. Plowright, Syl's mother, with secrets of her own, does not want the marriage to take place, and her addled state, especially when Lili gets her tipsy, is both amusing and poignant. Julie Walters, as Margaret's mother, is less sympathetic--a woman pushing her own agenda for her own reasons, and at any cost, though she reveals some of her own problems, too. Lena Headey, as Margaret, is suitably vacant--emotionally destroyed and therefore pliable--a girl difficult to identify with because she has made herself a cipher.

A wonderful film which honors and reflects the tone and style of Ellis's novels, this social comedy is visually exciting at the same time that it offers food for thought. A terrific BBC film! n Mary Whipple