I have compared The Time of the Cuckoo: A Comedy（1951）, a Broadway play by Arthur Laurents, and its motion picture version, Summertime（1953）directed by David Lean, paying special attention to their relations with Venice, an Italian city in which their stories unfold. 　The Time of the Cuckoo is a work which makes its American audience reflect on their values by presenting conflicting attitudes between Americans who lay stress on the importance of morality, money and tangible things and Venetians who lay stress on that of love, desire and humans. 　Summertime, omitting this conflict from the original work, focuses on another problem: which is more important in life, morality or love and desire? This concentration transformed The Time of the Cuckoo, a problem play named a “comedy,” into a popular film about romance. 　In considering these two works, we should keep in mind that Venice, where their stories unravel, has a long history in the Englishspeaking world of being represented as the capital of degeneration. The Venetians have been regarded in the tradition as the embodiment of vices. Looked in regard to this history of representation, The Time of the Cuckoo and Summertime show the following characteristics. 　In the Laurents’ play, a newly-married American painter who has an affair with the landlady of a Venetian pensione repents afterwards, and an American female protagonist, who is attracted by a Venetian man, suspects mercenary motives behind his advances. They are both characterized as inheritors of Puritanical values: the young painter exhibits moralism, while the middle-aged single woman exhibits both moralism and materialism. Venice for them is a radically different world, strange and sinful in the way of thinking and living. As the American woman says, “I didn’t realize I came from such a different world,” a line which is ideally effective in this city of sin. 　Thrown into this city, whose corruption she abhors, the American heroine in Summertime not only faces the problem of entering and maintaining an illicit relationship with a married man, but also faces the danger of becoming a member of a detestable society. 　We may also see that David Lean was in a more advantageous position than Arthur Laurents in shooting the film in Venice, for he could effectively emphasize the inversion of values at the beginning by showing the visual inversion of land and water in the image of buses running on the canals. The surprise of the heroine at the sight soon leads to her bewilderment on a deeper level.