Throughout the fifties, Hollywood, like the restless heroines of these two films, gnawed away at the moralistic constraints of the Production Code. By 1959, a film like the expertly crafted soaper A Summer Place could resolve itself leaving adultery and teenage sex conspicuously unpunished. Dorothy McGuire and Richard Egan are the two libidinous oldsters, locked in unhappy marriages, whose extra-marital romance ends happily in divorces all around. But for the public it was Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue who really smoked as the two kids whose forbidden love leads inexorably to pregnancy. Because the film is forgiving, the critics were merciless: A Summer Place “leaves a rancid taste...the beautiful coastal setting lays bare the film's preoccupation with sex,” read the New York Times. Films In Review called it “propaganda for teenage sexual intercourse,” and Time got the point, noting that it “treats adultery as casually as if there were nothing at all holy about matrimony.”