One of the many cool regular columns that we’re running right now on Screengrab is Leonard Pierce’s weekly feature Summerfest 2008. All summer long, Leonard has tasked himself to write about one movie a week with the word “summer” in the title. Personally, I’m hoping he gets around to one of Eric Rohmer’s seasonal classics- either Summer/The Green Ray or A Summer’s Tale- but I realize that at one movie a week, the series will be far from comprehensive. Happily, Leonard has given me permission to help him out on that front, to write up a Yesterday’s Hits that neatly dovetailed with his goal. So to that end, I’ve decided to review a summer-y hit of yesteryear, Robert Mulligan’s 1971 film Summer of ‘42.
What made Summer of ‘42 a hit? After the fall of the Production Code, the newfound permissiveness changed the face of Hollywood filmmaking. But while many filmmakers tried to push the envelope of what was acceptable, Summer of ‘42 took a different approach, injecting sexuality into the framework of what was essentially a nostalgia piece for a more innocent time- the 1940s. It was this period setting- and the tastefulness of the storytelling- that appealed to older audience members who otherwise might not have been interested in an R-rated movie about the sexual stirrings of teenagers. At the same time, it was this same nostalgia which appealed to the children of a more permissive era, who marveled at how naïve the children of the period were, learning about sex from books and hemming and hawing at the idea of buying birth control at the local pharmacy.
But one also shouldn’t underestimate the appeal of the film’s most prominent storyline, the deflowering of the film’s teenaged protagonist “Hermie” (Gary Grimes) by the recent war widow Dorothy (Jennifer O’Neill). The older-woman fantasy has long been a popular one among young men, and Summer of ‘42 was one of the first Hollywood films to portray it in any detail. Unlike The Graduate, which pretty much turned its older woman into a predator all the better to hammer home its youth-friendly message, Summer of ‘42 told its older-woman/younger-man story with a tenderness befitting those fantasies held by generations of teenagers. Combine all of these factors with a fresh-faced cast of unknowns and the film became a surprise hit, one of the top grossers of 1971 and an Academy Award winner for Michel Legrand’s bittersweet score.
What happened? Compared to most hits of the day, Summer of ‘42 was fairly small-scale and unassuming, so it didn’t linger in the zeitgeist in quite the same way as, say, contemporaneous fellow Yesterday’s Hits selections The Way We Were and Love Story. For one thing, the nostalgia Mulligan’s film offered paled in comparison to the melodramatic pull of Love Story, and its low-wattage cast couldn’t compare with the pairing of Streisand and Redford. Finally, while the sincerity of the film’s portrayal of 1940s sexual innocence originally appealed the audiences, it became less relatable as the years passed, to the point where the famous condom-buying scene was parodied in an English television commercial. Like so many films, both in the past and today, Summer of ‘42 just wasn’t made to withstand the passage of time.
Does Summer of ‘42 still work? Kind of. One of the most charming aspects of the movie is its time-capsule quality, both of the 1940s and the 1970s’ concept of 1940s life. In our more sexually-frank age, it’s hard to remember a time when sex wasn’t just a mouse-click away, but Mulligan and writer Herman Rauscher portray this time with warmth. At the same time, the movie gets a lot of more universal details right, especially the way young men always try just a little too hard to impress women, to say nothing of those tentative grope session in the back row of the local movie house- a detail that rings just as true when the movie is Now, Voyager as when it’s Iron Man.
But there’s always something that has stuck in my craw about the older-woman fantasy, both in the film and in general. Namely, what does the older woman think? In Alfonso Cuaron’s Y Tu Mama Tambien- currently the benchmark for onscreen portrayals of this premise- the question was answered by making the older woman the central player in the story. By contrast, in Summer of ‘42, Dorothy exists almost entirely to be admired by Hermie- first from a distance, then up close, then closer still. After Dorothy’s husband ships off to war, she befriends the kid, and the same day she finds out her husband has been killed, she responds by sleeping with him. After that, she disappears forever. To quote the Church Lady, “how conveeeeeeeeeenient!”
In the end, Summer of ‘42’s nostalgia is too rose-colored by half. The film was based on the real-life experiences of screenwriter Herman Rauscher (note the protagonist’s name), whose memories of the actual events were surely smoothed out from almost three decades’ distance. But the reality of one’s teenaged sexual awakening- not only Rauscher’s but practically everyone’s- is almost never this tidy. Most of the time, it’s fraught with anxiety and more than a little shame, two factors that can’t be dealt with simply by staring meaningfully into the distance as Hermie does in the film. By downplaying this emotional prickliness, Summer of ‘42 became a favorite date movie for 1971 audiences, but had the film kept more of this, it could very well have become a true-blue classic.