LAST SUMMER 1969

The occasion of a recent TCM screening of the R-rated edit of this forgotten minor masterpiece from the late '60s (one of several by director Frank Perry yet to make it to DVD - Play It As It Lays, Diary of a Mad Housewife) inspired me to seek out the X-rated version I still remembered so vividly from my youth. And as memories go, that’s really saying something, for the youth I speak of is the summer of 1969 when I was 12 years old. In 1969, the newly instated motion picture rating system (G, M, R, and X) designated the X rating for films with mature themes from which anyone under the age of 17 was prohibited. Contrary to what “adult” and “X-rated” has come to signify today (porn), back in 1969 Hollywood harbored the idealistically naïve hope that such a restrictive rating would both serve to protect local standards of decency while ensuring filmmakers maximal artistic freedom and minimal censorship interference.
Boy, just writing the above sentence made me all wistful and nostalgic for why the late '60s and '70s remains my favorite era in American film. The notion that mainstream Hollywood believed, even briefly, in the notion that there was such an animal as a mature adult audience is near unimaginable in today’s climate of ceaseless comic book franchises.

At left: The vague, rather arty newspaper ad for Last Summer containing its original X-rating. Right: The provocative wide-release one-sheet poster with the R-rating. 

Before America’s repressed and essentially hypocritical attitude about all things sexual reared its head, a slew of intriguing X-rated films were released during this time: The Damned, Midnight Cowboy, Last Tango in Paris, Last Summer, A Clockwork Orange, Medium Cool; each giving the false impression that American movies had, after an eternity in Production Code mandated arrested development, at last, grown up. Alas, it was not to be. Soon the “X” rating was appropriated by the porn industry and the MPAA (the industry rating board) embarked on a course of action—doling out harsh ratings for minor displays of nudity or hints of sexuality, yet showing an absurd leniency when it came to acts of extreme violence—that over the years rendered it, if not a laughingstock, then certainly irrelevant.

Barbara Hershey as Sandy

Richard Thomas as Peter

Bruce Davison as Dan

Catherine Burns as Rhoda

The summer of 1969 saw the release of John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy and Frank Perry’s Last Summer within months of one another. Everyone was talking about these two high-profile, controversial, X-rated features, and, thanks to the lax admittance policies of my local movie theater, I was able to see both that summer in spite of my tender, albeit jaded, years. Midnight Cowboy, of course, went on to great acclaim and a Best Picture Academy Award win, but Last Summer (in spite of having garnered a Best Supporting Actress nod for newcomer Catherine Burns) seems to have been all but forgotten.

Unlike Midnight Cowboy, Last Summer didn't retain its "X" rating for long. After playing very briefly in NYC with the X- tag, Perry agreed to delete a couple of swear words and a few frames from the film's harrowing climax to give his film the "R"-rating before going into wide release in August of 1969. (Although the rating system was still in its relative infancy, many national newspapers were already refusing to carry ads for X-rated films, even those claiming artistic merit). 

In a scene emphasizing Sandy's sexual acquisitiveness and dominance over the boys' relative inexperience, she and Dan come across two lovers making out on a remote part of the beach. When it's discovered that the lovers are two men, Dan wants to leave but Sandy insists they stay and watch.

With its title a darkly ironic harkening back to the innocent, sun-and-sand Gidget movies of the sixties, or those sexually innocuous Frankie & Annette Beach Party romps, Last Summer is perhaps one of the harshest eviscerations of adolescent social dynamics I've ever seen. Neither a youth-pandering idealization of the Pepsi Generation of the sort typified by late-'60s films like The Graduate and Easy Rider, nor one of those nostalgically sentimental coming-of-age films that would later flourish in the '70s (The Summer of ’42, The Last Picture Show, American Graffiti); Last Summer is adolescence viewed through a doggedly nihilistic prism.

A trio of teens vacationing with their parents on Fire Island strike up an intimate friendship when callow, future fratboy Dan (Davison), and sensitive go-alonger Peter (Thomas) come upon sexually precocious brainiac, Sandy (Hershey- “Well you asked me, so don’t think I’m boasting, but my IQ is 157.”) tending to a wounded seagull on the beach. Bonding over their shared isolation, sexual restlessness, and an overweening, heretofore unplumbed disdain for the feelings of others; the threesome find the dynamics of their tightly-knit group challenged with the appearance of Rhoda, a bright but shy and awkward girl who insinuates herself into the fold.

Loners
One of the film's few sympathetic characters, Rhoda is introduced committing a simple act of decency: she tries to get the trio to stop tormenting the seagull they're attempting to make into a pet. 

Plump and pale to their tall and tawny; braces-wearing and happy to act her age to the trio’s fevered acceleration into adulthood; it’s fairly obvious from the start that Rhoda’s emotional self-assurance and killjoy, sober decency is a wrong mix for this crowd (who find in Rhoda another “project” like the injured gull). Yet the point is keenly made by the film that in adolescence, the pain of loneliness can be so acute that even the belittling company of those who fail to see your value is sometimes preferable to being alone.

Poignancy is derived from the realization that all four teens come from broken or troubled homes and that together they could have faced their shared loneliness, alienation, and struggles for identity in ways enriching for them, both as friends and in ways individual. That summer could have been memorable for a lot of good reasons. But, being at its heart an existential parable on authenticity, dread, and the concept of decency as a choice one makes as readily as one can choose cruelty, Last Summer is a season made memorable for our protagonists in ways none of them could have foreseen and none will likely ever forget.

Rhoda and Peter's tentative friendship threatens the dynamic of the group

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

 Like so many of my favorite films from this era: They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Midnight Cowboy, Puzzle of a Downfall Child, even Rosemary's Baby; Last Summer is for me a brilliant example of how fascinating the results can be when mainstream movies and art films combine. What all these films have in common is their being accessible narratives that nevertheless convey the darker aspects of American disillusionment in the late '60s. So often I find movies today tend to feed audiences comforting images of themselves and set out to reinforce tissue-thin myths we harbor about everything from sexual politics to racism. Although I don't require it in every film I see, I must say I enjoy it when movies hold up a mirror to American culture that reveals the decay behind the gloss. 

Last Summer fails to skirt the uncomfortable racist implications behind the privileged arrogance of the Aryan blond teens in their all-white enclaves who idiotically mimic the contrived slave dialect of Gone With the Wind, and, in this painful scene, make cruel, racist jokes at the expense of Anibal Gomez (Ernesto Gonzalez), a sweet and lonely Puerto Rican computer date set-up for the reluctant Rhoda.

Movies in the '60s/'70s were comfortable with revealing the darker shades of human nature. In fact, one of my strongest memories from this period in filmmaking was the distinct impression I was never going to see a movie with a happy ending again. I enjoyed seeing movies that made me think, made me feel...but at times it seemed as if every movie released during my teens ended in some devastating tragedy. Even the musicals were downers: Sweet Charity!


PERFORMANCES

Relying perhaps on type-casting and using his young cast's relative acting inexperience to their benefit (Last Summer is the film debut of all but Barbara Hershey, who appeared in Doris Day's last film, With Six You Get Eggroll just the year before), Frank Perry gets natural and surprisingly complex performances out everyone, particularly Catherine Burns. Although lacking in the sort of easy, obvious camaraderie Peter Bogdanovich was able to achieve with his cast in The Last Picture Show (most apparent in an uncomfortably forced, "teens bonding" sequence that gives credence to Hershey's claim that despite the intimacy required of their roles, the cast didn't become close during the making of the film), each actor achieves a kind of heroic bravery in allowing themselves to be presented so honestly and unpleasantly.

New Blood
Bruce Davison found success starring in the 1971 thriller, Willard; Barbara Hershey went go on to make headlines throughout the 70s for being David Carradine's "old lady" and breastfeeding their child on The Dick Cavett Show; and Richard Thomas became a household name as TV's John-Boy Walton. Ironically, it would be Cathy Burns, garnering the lion's share of the film's best reviews and Last Summer's sole Academy Award nod, who, after being reunited with Richard Thomas in 1971's Red Sky at Morning, disappeared into relative oblivion after a few years of episodic TV appearances.

Much has been made of Burn's virtuoso monologue that most deservedly won her an Oscar nomination, and indeed, Burns does give the film's most shaded performance. But Barbara Hershey's assured and dynamic performance as the dreamgirl sociopath is one that has really stayed with me over the years. Carnal, conniving, straightforward, and deeply troubled, I think her characterization is so genuinely terrifying because she is just such a recognizable brand of emotional/intellectual bully. Long a favorite of mine and a definite object of a boyhood crush, I'm glad she's still around making films (even scarier as the ballet-mom in Black Swan!) and proving herself a talented and enduring actress.

Barbara Hershey  (born Barbara Hertzstein) briefly changed her name to Barbara Seagull after she claimed the spirit of a  seagull accidentally killed during the making of Last Summer had entered her body. She stated that it was a moral choice born of feeling guilty about its death. It was also a very hippie-esque one for the actress who would later name her illegitimate son by David Carradine, "Free," and planted the child's afterbirth under an apricot tree in her back yard "...so he can eat the fruit nurtured by our own bodies." Coming to her senses, Hershey eventually dropped the Seagull, and her son now goes by very un-Flower Child, but less giggle-prone, name of Tom. 

Poster for the 1975 heist film Diamonds, featuring Barbara Hershey with her "Seagull" billing

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Perhaps the parallel symbolism is all too heavy-handed for some, but what I loved about this film in 1969 and what still stands up marvelously in 2013, are the parallels drawn between the film's early sequences involving the attempt to rehabilitate and then train the wounded seagull, and the introduction of the character of Rhoda into the group. The foreshadowing of the film's agonizing denouement is as clear-cut and unalterable as a self-fulfilling prophecy, but what grips me is what lies behind why it happens at all.
To see this film now is to understand what occurs inside any group or individual in power when threatened with the loss of that power. Whether it be the behavior of the GOP in the last election or the reluctance of certain states to grasp the inevitability of same-sex marriage; it all fit paints an ugly portrait of cowardice cloaked in entitled domination. To find all of this within a teenage coming-of-age film is just brilliant, and provides one more reason why this film deserves to be seen.

The casual distractions of an idle summer gradually escalate into experimentation with sex and drugs.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

For years on the internet, there have been reports of Last Summer finally getting a DVD release. Its reemergence on cable TV and a recent American Cinematheque screening of a long-lost, uncut 16mm print hint that perhaps one day soon this might very well be the case. I certainly hope so. Not only is it one of Frank Perry's best films and, as far as I'm concerned, one of the more important films of the era,  but its themes are no less relevant today than they were in 1969. Sure, the antisocial behavior and so-called explicit dialogue of these teens looks positively quaint in the face of what goes on in the hyper-sexualized, accelerated world of adolescents today, but one of the points in Last Summer that still resonates with truth is the observation that play-acting at being grown-up is by no stretch of the imagination the same thing as genuine maturity. A smart and insightful character-driven motion picture, Last Summer is a reminder of how good movies can be when filmmakers care about something beyond being a hit at the boxoffice.

BONUS MATERIAL

I read Evan Hunter’s novel Last Summer not long after seeing the film and I’d highly recommend it. Eleanor Perry’s screenplay is a faithful adaptation of the book, which is every bit as disturbing as the film. The slight novel provides a bit more backstory to the characters and is told in the form of a flashback memory recounted by an emotionally shattered Peter to his psychiatrist. In 1973 Hunter wrote a sequel to Last Summer titled Come Winter. I’d say that both novels are unavailable and out of print, but is anything really out of print with eBay around?

Evan Hunter, famous for the novel Blackboard Jungle, is also well known to Hitchcock fans as the screenwriter of The Birds. He was fired from his duties on Hitchcock’s next film, Marnie, for reasons far too ironic to recount here. Those who are interested can find the info in the trivia section of IMDB’s Marnie page.

The late director Frank Perry, largely forgotten today, was one of the heavy hitters in the Golden Age of the New Hollywood. He is responsible for two of the best films to come out of that prolific time: Last Summer and Diary of a Mad Housewife. Making it all the more incomprehensible to me that this is the same Frank Perry who gave us the execrable laugh-fest, Monsignor (1982), and the exquisite awfulness of Mommie Dearest. Talk about your loss of innocence.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009- 2013