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Back to the Feature: Summer of '42 (1971)

I and other critics like to bemoan movies that operate on pure nostalgia. But I get it, the comfort of the past is so alluring that it is easy to want to escape into -hence why it feels like such a lazy device in movies. The 2020s are awash in nostalgia in a cynical effort to cash in on fond memories and youthful feelings, and while it’s never been as prolific a characteristic it is not without some precedent. Previous decades and other generations had their own nostalgia-bait though it took on different forms and wasn’t entirely tied to pop culture. Still, it was driven by that same sensation. In the 1970s, perhaps the best nostalgia picture was George Lucas’s American Graffiti with its image of carefree California youths in the early 1960s pre-Vietnam. But an equally popular one was Summer of ‘42.
Summer of ‘42 is an interesting nostalgia film though because its nostalgia is melancholy in nature. It is reflective of a period of youth marked by innocence but also the loss of it, feelings and impulses more than references and aesthetics. Therefore while it is called Summer of ‘42 it could be said to be very universal on account of that thematic focus. It really isn’t however, it is stuck in its time -though perhaps not so much the early 40s in which it is set but the early 70s in which it was written -or rather recounted by its author Herman Raucher who based most of it off of his real experience as a young teen during that summer falling in love for the first time with an older woman. His lead character is even called “Hermie”.
Directed by Robert Mulligan, previously best-known for To Kill a Mockingbird, the film exists at a kind of crossroads between the fading Old Hollywood and the emergent New Hollywood, melding in the dialogue a classic tenor with a modern frankness and a romanticized context with some sense of grounding. Made for a paltry one million dollars, it also features no notable stars apart from model-turned-actress Jennifer O’Neill as the object (a very pertinent term) of young Hermie’s affections. Hermie, played by Gary Grimes, is a fifteen year-old spending the titular summer on an island standing in for Nantucket with a couple of boys who are eager to discover sex. While his friend Oscy (Jerry Houser) is focused on lusting after girls their own age, Hermie becomes fixated on an older married woman whose husband has just left to fight in the war. Volunteering to help her with groceries and chores, he eventually learns her name is Dorothy and through the summer speculates on the idea of a romance with her.
It is the primary focus, though interspersed also with other often lust-oriented summer experiences, such as a pair of awkward dates he and Oscy take a couple nice local girls on. In these sexual pursuits it is made clear how little or how shallowly both boys’ understanding of sex is, even as Hermie takes it a touch more seriously than Oscy. It has a real pang of authenticity to it, in beats like Hermie fondling his girl’s elbow mistaking it for a breast or in the extreme awkwardness of his attempt to buy ‘rubbers’ at a convenience store in and among other things while failing to convince the clerk that they are for his brother. It’s the kind of stuff you might see in a teen sex comedy decades later, though with a different style to the crudeness reflective of the 1940s setting. And frankly a more believable tone, suggesting that for whatever else Raucher had both a good memory for the behaviour of kids of his generation and was uninterested in exaggerating for comedic or easy crowd-pleasing sake.
Moments like these have a life to them, indicative of adolescence and self-discovery and some of the harshness that goes along with it. During a second beach date, the girl Hermie is with is traumatized when she happens upon her friend and Oscy having sex. It’s a bitter moment, made all the more so by this being her last appearance in the movie. We don’t know what happens to her next, though that is the point. She is an accessory to Hermie’s story and is insignificant to it after. Indeed, she was insignificant all along -he only ever really had eyes for Dorothy.
There might be some real power in these true-to-life vignettes, and Hermie’s obsession with Dorothy, if either Grimes was a stronger actor or Raucher a little more self-critical in his script. On the acting front, nobody really leaves much of an impression, apart from possibly Houser in some of his line deliveries, but the amateur acting does not land the right side of charmingly authentic that the script endeavours to be. And where that script is concerned, Raucher may be a little too close to the material -it is after all his own. But that means he doesn’t perceive it objectively outside of himself and it really shows in the film, Hermie’s point-of-view, and its treatment of Dorothy.
Summer of ‘42 may not be the glorification kind of nostalgia that we are used to today, but its bittersweet, wholly reflective nature is harmed by its lack of nuance. Nothing outside of Hermie’s vantage point is validated, and doesn’t necessarily need to be, but there is no sign that Raucher is aware of that in his script. There is a touch of understanding that Dorothy is to Hermie an object more than a person, and that is reflective in how the movie treats her, with this enigmatic aura of mature sexuality that O’Neill does encapsulate well considering she was a roughly a decade younger than her character is meant to be and it doesn’t show. She is put on a pedestal, which may again be a facet of perspective yet it is also unclear if that is Raucher’s intent. A part of the confusion honestly stems from just general attitudes at the time (in this case, when the movie was made) towards women framed through the lens of male sexual desire. There are enough examples of films from around the time that take such an attitude straight without veneer of irony or critique (Kubrick’s Lolita suffers for the same reason). We can see -I would say especially so now- that Hermie doesn’t actually care about Dorothy, he cares about the idea of her. For all the chores he helps her with and time he spends trying to get close to her he doesn’t in any way know her as a person. And him being our point-of-view, neither do we. It makes sense for this to be the case for the story, but the film doesn’t indicate much interest in Dorothy either -there’s no touches in the filmmaking to imply she is not the facsimile that Hermie makes her out as. And that is especially so given where the film ultimately leads with this relationship.
In Raucher’s own story, he got far with the woman Dorothy was based on. He came to her in the immediate aftermath of her learning her husband had died, and while there was an overture of something sexual in their interaction, nothing came of it. In his movie though, something did. The climax is uncomfortable on a few fronts -some intentionally so, some not. The main thing however is that Hermie takes advantage of a woman in an emotionally vulnerable state. She needs comfort and he is there to provide, but what she needs and what he wants to give are not the same. Even with the most generous filter, it is hard to see what transpires as anything other than Hermie fulfilling the culmination of his romantic desire at the expense of Dorothy’s confused emotional state. As she approaches him in the midst of grief and her designs become more sexual, he takes no opportunity to turn her away or opt for a platonic though kind gesture (in spite of his previous attitude valuing romance more than sex). Instead, he goes through with it and sleeps with her. To be clear, Mulligan doesn’t fetishize this wish fulfillment -Hermie is notably nervous and even a bit emotionless as it happens. Dorothy leaves the bed some time afterwards and calmly tells Hermie to leave -the last time he ever sees her.
It is not a romantic moment but it is romanticized. There is a degree of sexual trauma acknowledged, in both the attitudes of Dorothy and Hermie afterwards and in Hermie’s voiceover noting how the experience forever changed him and in quite a visceral way lost him his innocence -but it is underplayed next to the bittersweet tenor with which it is evoked. Dorothy leaves him a letter hoping he will find a way to healthily remember their experience and that he won’t have to suffer the pain and loss of war, apparently validating their relationship at least in a small way. It is obviously not the kind of thing that a movie could get away with today, but what really is missing is that clarity of the mistake, suggesting that Raucher doesn’t believe it was one. The weight of what happened is conveyed, as are its traumatic underpinnings for both, and yet it is framed as a necessary step for Hermie towards maturity. In that sense, though the whole thing is handled with delicacy, it does romanticize and validate the notion of a teenager losing his virginity to an adult woman. Being as this did not happen in real life for Raucher, you can’t help but interpret it as him strangely wishing it had.
Beyond this though the wistful atmosphere throughout the movie and its measured pace has a dulling effect at times. Authenticity can be great but it often needs either direction or a stronger thematic core to resonate beyond the audience relishing the nostalgia. Summer of ‘42 was indeed one of the first movies accused of using nostalgia as a crutch, albeit again in a very different way to how it is used today (I think people would be more welcoming of this kind of nostalgia now). Remembering too that that target audience at the time would be folks in their forties and fifties, and not the young people who much of the rest of New Hollywood was catering too. And the movie’s tone is very sombre and melancholy over a period of life and an experience that does in some ways earn it, but in others feels overwrought. The famous score by Michel Legrand, which is otherwise excellent, fits that bill.
It can be a tedious movie, though a more interesting one to examine now perhaps than in 1971. For reasons that weren’t really discussed at the time around its ultimate resolution it both feels more pertinent and more repellent. Interestingly, it was much more successful in subsequent novelization form, which Raucher also wrote and it wound up being his detour into literature. Summer of ‘42 is a shallow film, though not for the reasons it was dismissed as such back then. Its perspective is revealing but not all that insightful, coloured by its author’s limited scope and lack of curiosity outside of it. Maybe a perfect nostalgia film in a sense.

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