Dee Lite

Image credit: Mandy Moore: Lisa O'Connor/ZUMA Press/Newscom

'SUMMER' LOVIN' Moore will reprise an iconic Sandra Dee role

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The virgin thing has worked pretty well for Mandy Moore, both as a teen pop princess (''Candy'') and a movie star (''A Walk to Remember''). So it's no surprise that Warner Bros. wants her to star in its remake of the 1959 romance ''A Summer Place,'' which starred Sandra Dee at her most archetypally chaste. Fellow squeaky-clean pop figure Kenneth ''Babyface'' Edmonds is already on board as a producer, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

Warner Bros. adapted the original ''Summer Place'' from a novel by Sloan Wilson. The movie, which looks like a camp classic today, with its barely suppressed hormones boiling beneath the surface of Eisenhower-era sexual modesty, told the story of a teen girl (Dee) and boy (Troy Donahue) who fall in love at a resort while her father and his mother (both married to others) rekindle their youthful affair. The film's swoony, string-laden instrumental theme by Max Steiner became a popular piece of make-out music, and the movie made Dee the top professional virgin of her day, junior division. (Doris Day held the senior title.) Later, of course, it also inspired ridicule in the form of that song in ''Grease'' that Stockard Channing used to poke fun at Olivia Newton-John's naive Sandy character. Which means that, 20 years from now, someone may be singing (with a sneer), ''Look at me, I'm Mandy Moore...''