Summer Holiday is a 1948 American musical-comedy film, directed by Rouben Mamoulian and starring Mickey Rooney and Gloria DeHaven.

[3][4][5] In addition to Walter Huston, the supporting cast features Frank Morgan as the drunken Uncle Sid, (a role originated in the stage play by Gene Lockhart, portrayed onscreen by Wallace Beery in 1935 and later by Jackie Gleason on Broadway) as well as Marilyn Maxwell, Agnes Moorehead, Selena Royle and Anne Francis.

Richard's father Nat Miller, editor of the town newspaper, is a wise man with a sense of humor that serves him well in facing the challenges of parenthood.

Richard has three other siblings: older brother Arthur, who is home on vacation from Yale; sister Mildred, and mischievous Tommy, the youngest.

The graduating class enters the auditorium marching to the Danville High fight song and smoothly transitions to an elegiac alma mater, and the camera pans over touching vignettes of listening townspeople, including a deliberate recreations of Grant Wood's Daughters of Revolution, Woman with Plants and American Gothic.

Richard, who is valedictorian, plans to give a Marxist call to arms, but he leaves his speech where his father can see it and, during a round of applause, Nat stops him before he can get to the revolutionary material.

Richard, still spouting revolutionary propaganda and scorning the 4th, is surprised to find that his father has not only read Carlyle's The French Revolution: A History, but admires it—as he does the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam.

When Nat Miller takes the whole things with a sense of humor, McComber threatens him with loss of his advertising and storms out, leaving a farewell letter from Muriel to Richard, dictated by him.

It has a nightmarish quality that is enhanced by the way Belle's costume changes, from pastel pink to scarlet and back, and the bright green wash of light over the background.

substitutes Eugene O’'Neill's "reminiscence of adolescent youth" for the antics of Andy Hardy's Mickey Rooney, "clowning in his familiarly broad and impish way" and "his inclination to steal every scene".

Crowther notes director Rouben Mamoulian's effective handling of the "I Think You're the Sweetest Kid I've Ever Known" musical sequence with Marilyn Maxwell, and is generally approving of the entire cast.

"[12][13] Much of the criticism was harsh, including the British press, where C. A. Lejeune in The Observer called Summer Holiday "a degrading film".

[19] Film historian Tom Milne praises the "utopian" Midwestern idyll that Mamoulian creates, in particular the "superb" Independence Day picnic sequence.

[20] Milne add this caveat: The film is least successful in one brief sequence where it attempts to re-create too faithfully in a series of tableaux vivants based on famous paintings by Grant Wood (Daughters of Revolution (1932), as well as American Gothic (1930).

Film historian Marc Spergel places responsibility for this on director Rouben Momoulian: Mamoulian typically bloated a simple story with visual excess.

[24]Spergel adds that contemporary reviews were almost unanimous in their distaste for Mamoulian's handling of Mickey Rooney in his role as the youth Richard Miller: "...showing off and over-acting to the detriment of the film".

Aged 26 and recently divorced from movie star Ava Gardner, he could hardly pass as a high school virgin on or off screen.

[26] Jenson cautions that despite his critics, Mamoulian's film adaption showed fidelity to O'Neill's, but erred in duplicating the spirit of the play perhaps too fulsomely.