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Summertime (Lopert; United Artists] brings Bachelor Girl Katharine Hepburn to Venice tremulous with excitement, ready for adventure and eager for love. But this is only one Hepburn, and the buried one at that. On the surface is Hepburn's other, more dominant self: a woman grimly determined--above all else --not to be played for a sucker.

The tragicomedy of Katharine the Shrewd and Kate the Romantic is played out against the overpowering Technicolor backdrop of Venice. At first. Katharine is all businesslike competence: she industriously snaps photos, craftily measures out tips, keeps her basilisk eye fixed warily on the untrustworthy Italians. But then the Venetian magic begins; she throws open her pensione window to a vista of blue sky, green water and honey-colored walls. She walks along the canals, dazed by the murmurous dusk, by the majesty of campanile and palace, by the whisper of a distant guitar. Few actresses in films could equal Hepburn's evocation of aching loneliness on her first night in Venice as she wanders, forlorn and proud, like a primly starched ghost in a city of lovers.

At a cafe table she glances furtively at a handsome man nearby. When she looks again, she meets his appraising eye and is as panicked as a mother hen who sees the circling shadow of a hawk. She flees. But every path seems to lead her back to the same man and with the slow drift of the days, her panic subsides, breaks out, subsides again and finally softens to surrender. Italy's Rossano Brazzi complements Kate's artistry every step of the way. As a married but amorous art dealer, he plays her lover with wit, affection and--when necessary--a matching anger: "You are like a hungry child who is given ravioli to eat," he cries. " 'No,' you say, 'I want beefsteak.' My dear girl, you are hungry . . . Eat the ravioli."

Adapted by Director David (Great Expectations') Lean and Novelist H. E. Bates from the Broadway success, The Time of the Cuckoo, the script has dropped overboard many of the plot gimmicks that Playwright Arthur Laurents used as cogs for stage action. With them go some of the harsher truths about the career girl's character and therefore any possibility of comparing Hepburn's performance with that of Shirley Booth in the stage play. The movie is scarcely more than a charming idyl, and it ends only because Kate is convinced that "All my life I've stayed at parties too long because I didn't know when to go." This time, after a few days of dalliance on the island of Burano, Hepburn goes home. Isa Miranda and young Gaetano Audiero help make Venice seem appealing, while MacDonald Parke and Jane Rose work hard as comic U.S. tourists. The Eastman Color and the camerawork by Jack Hildyard are superb.

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