David Lean’s lush adaptation of Arthur Laurents’ play The Time of the Cuckoo is a love letter to Venice. It is also Katherine Hepburn’s best film of the 1950s. Hepburn’s Jane Hudson describes herself as a “fancy secretary” and an “independent type” from Akron, Ohio. Her regal beauty and patrician bearing suggest she is single by choice. She has been waiting for something her circumstances could not provide, “a wonderful, mystical, magical, miracle,” as she describes it—in other words, a revelatory experience. After saving for a lifetime, she comes to Europe “to find what she’s been missing all her life.” And she finds it not in her passing romance with Rossano Brazzi, but in the beauty of the landscape. Lean’s genius for landscapes is on full view here, especially in the scenes on the island of Burano, where he captures the golden panorama of the mercurial Venetian sky. From the opening scene on, Hudson is shown looking at the city through her movie camera; we see her looking, then we see what she’s seeing. It’s a film about the ecstasy in the act of looking and discovering. “I don’t want to forget any of it. Not a single moment,” Hepburn says toward the end, as the bells toll and the pigeons in the Piazza take flight. How do you hold onto an experience, take it deep down, so that it transforms you?