Based on the lightest play by Eugene O’Neill, Ah, Wilderness!, Summer Holiday was further lightened and made into a sunny musical. In his slice of small-town America at the turn of the 20th century, Mamoulian plays up the long-gone, nostalgic Danville, Connecticut of memory—even including restaged paintings of artists such as Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton—so that his coming-of-age tale feels more like an afternoon reverie. As in Love Me Tonight, the film verges into Jacques Demy territory: all of the songs—sung by the actors in their actual voices—are smoothly blended into the rhythmic fabric of the film. A town of colorful characters swirls around Mickey Rooney’s young Richard, just graduating high school and contemplating love, marriage and changing the world. Unlike the politics in earlier Mamoulian films, Richard’s leftist ideals are relegated to the quixotic dustbin of his other adolescent expressions of self-importance, and his hardest life lessons appear more awkward and confusing than profoundly painful.