Penelope Mortimer wrote the screenplay in the 1960s, took the money, and forgot about it. 20 years later the film went into production and she was called back to make revisions. "I couldn't remember a thing about it," she said.

The producers insisted the leads needed to make love. "I was terribly anxious that the couple should never have it off," Mortimer said. "But oh no they had to have all those muscles writhing in the moonlight." (It's a beautiful scene, but does feel out of place.)

A SUMMER STORY (1988) is adapted from John Galsworthy's 1916 short story "The Apple Tree," and directed by Piers Haggard, who had previously made the BBC's Pennies from Heaven.

The film was shot on location in Devon in the summer of 1987. The apple tree of the original title had to be written out a week before shooting began because it was the wrong time of year.

The cast includes James Wilby - who the same year appeared in Merchant Ivory's Maurice - as Frank Ashton, a young London barrister who twists his ankle on a walking holiday in Dartmoor and is taken in at a nearby farmhouse, where he falls for the farmer's daughter Megan, played by Imogen Stubbs.

Susannah York plays the aunt. Jerome Flynn, later of Game of Thrones, appears in an early role as Frank's friend.

The Dartmoor landscape, shot by Kenneth MacMillan, is as beautiful as anything in a Merchant Ivory film, which is the comparison almost every reviewer has lurched for.

What it actually reminds me of - more than any Merchant Ivory film - is Roman Polanski's Tess (1979). A Summer Story features similar pastoral beauty and makes a similar statement about the casual cruelty of men, especially men of privilege.

Georges Delerue's lush orchestral score is full of longing and regret - heartbreaking and underappreciated, just like the film.