Summer Magic

Summer Magic is a 1963 American musical film directed by James Neilson, and starring Hayley Mills, Burl Ives, and Dorothy McGuire in a story about an early 1900s Boston widow and her children taking up residence in a small town in Maine. The film was based on the novel Mother Carey's Chickens by Kate Douglas Wiggin. It was the fourth of six films that Mills appeared in for Disney, and the young actress received a Golden Globe nomination for her work. Mills later said it was the worst of the movies she made for Disney. Plot In the early 20th-century, financial problems force young Boston widow Margaret Carey (Dorothy McGuire) and her 3 children to move out of their home. Nancy (Hayley Mills), the dramatic but kind-hearted eldest child, remembers a large yellow house that the Careys had admired when they visited the small town of Beulah, Maine, and makes an inquiry about it. Upon the sale of the family's treasured piano ("Flitterin'"), Nancy reveals that the house is vacant and the family decides to relocate to the country ("Beautiful Beulah").