Thursday Movie Picks, June 8, 2023: Seasons in the title

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This time out, the theme is a fairly easy one, and one that really calls for doing four movies: Movies with a season in the title. In the end, I decided on three movies, with a sort of cheat for the fourth season:

The Lion in Winter (1968). Katharine Hepburn won her third Oscar playing Eleanor of Aquitaine, the estranged wife of Henry II of England (Peter O'Toole). Over Christmas in 1183, the two and their surviving sons have a family reunion which devolves into a heated debate over who should succeed Henry II as king: Richard the Lionheart (Anthony Hopkins) is Mom's choice (and Anthony Hopkins did a great Star of the Month piece on Hepburn for TCM some years back, discussing this movie quite a bit as it was Hopkins' first big role), while John (Nigel Terry) is Dad's choice.

Autumn Sonata (1978). I think I've picked this movie before, but it's Ingrid Bergman's final feature film and earned her one final Oscar nomination. She plays a concert pianist, widowed for the second time, who decides that she's going to take a break from performing by visiting her daughter (Liv Ullmann). Her daughter, however, isn't a particularly good musician which dismays Mom, having decided to give up any attempt at a musical career to marry a country priest as well as take care of her sister since the two siblings have been estranged from Mom. It doesn't take long to understand why the daughters became estranged from Mom.

Summer Holiday (1948). A musical version of Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness!, this movie stars 27-year-old Mickey Rooney as a young man at the turn of the century about to graduate high school and go off into the big wide world, even though he doesn't know that much about greater world out there or about being an adult. In the 1935 version of Ah, Wilderness!, Rooney played the kid brother.

Finally, I'd like to mention, The Devil and Miss Jones (1941). That's because of the presence of character actress Spring Byington. Charles Coburn stars as a wealthy businessman who learns of labor unrest in a forgotten corner of his business empire, a department store, and decides to go undercover in the shoe department to learn for himself what's going on. Byington plays one of the clerks who winds up becoming a love interest to Coburn not realizing his true identity. The real star is Jean Arthur as another clerk; she's got a love interest in the form of union agitator Robert Cummings.