THE BABY MAKER 1970

In 1970--decades before the topic of surrogacy became a standby staple of Lifetime TV thrillers, mediocre comedy fodder (Paternity, Baby Mama), or a nightmare vision of a dystopian future (The Handmaid’s Tale)--it was considered a subject so unique and unusual that critics and audiences alike were at a bit of a loss as to how to respond to a movie proposing surrogacy as a legitimate alternative for a couple wanting a child but unable to conceive.  

Barbara Hershey as Patricia "Tish" Gray

Sam Groom as Jay Wilcox

Collin Wilcox as Suzanne Wilcox

Scott Glenn as Tad Jacks

The Baby Maker, the debut film of Oscar-nominated screenwriter James Bridges (The Paper Chase, The China Syndrome) tells the story of a Los Angles hippie (Barbara Hershey, the then go-to flower child of the movies) who, for a substantial amount of money and because she just loves being pregnant (“Proof of the reality of my own existence”), agrees to bear a child for a square-but-nice, well-to-do Brentwood couple (Sam Groom & Collin Wilcox). Combining as it does—with varying degrees of success—elements of the well-intentioned Generation Gap TV movie (Maybe I’ll Come Home in The Spring); the quickie cash-in counterculture youth flick (1969s natural childbirth gimmick comedy Generation); the racy and “with it” social exposé (The Christine Jorgensen Story); and the indie character drama (Five Easy Pieces), The Baby Maker proved a hard picture to categorize and an even tougher film to market.

"The kind of film that makes talk!" 
This ungrammatical tagline underscores the overall
please-don't-let-me-be-misunderstood tone of this newspaper ad (click to enlarge) 

Young audiences deemed The Baby Maker "too straight" and mainstream, just another example of a major studio depicting hippie counterculture inauthentically on the screen (a valid criticism considering The Baby Maker has a scene depicting Hershey's tree-hugger character literally hugging a tree). Meanwhile, mainstream critics labeled the film “bizarre”(The Miami News) and tripped over their words as they tried to frame the movie's then-daring themes in ways that didn't suggest simple exploitation and sensationalism. On that score, The Baby Maker's marketing campaign didn't help matters much.

 

Audiences titillated by the film’s teasingly salacious ad copy: “She’ll live with a couple. Share the husband. They get a baby that’s at least half theirs. She gets the joy of making it” (Time capsule note: the term "making it" was also '60s slang for having sex, so the ad engages in a bit of double entendre) were inevitably disappointed. 

Imagine expecting a movie about a hippy-dippy tie-dye three-way and instead find yourself watching a thoughtful, often clinical, nearly two-hour character drama contemplating the permanence of decisions in the era of "If it feels good, do it." 

Lili Valenty as Mrs. Culnick, the sweet little old lady go-between who
 facilitates the pairing of the childless couple with a willing surrogate

It also didn't help marketing matters much that America's love affair with the hippie was on the wane. A few months prior to the release of The Baby Maker, John G. Avildsen released a low-budget social melodrama titled Joe that climaxed in a vigilante massacre at a hippie commune by a pair of ultra-conservative working-class reactionaries. The film struck an odd, cathartic chord with a public still reeling from the hippie violence detailed in the ongoing Manson trials and became a controversial sleeper hit. In this social climate, The Baby Maker’s positive depiction of hippie culture and the idealism of youth started to look a tad dated and cliché.

All of which contributed to The Baby Maker enjoying only the briefest of theatrical runs before promptly disappearing from both movie screens and people's memories. This in spite of it having received a good share of favorable notices for its performances. Barbara Hershey attracted a lot of Best Actress Oscar nomination buzz in the trade papers, the film ultimately garnering an Academy Award nod for its original song score by composer Fred Karlin. (Karlin did win the Oscar that year, but in another category for a different film: Best Song “For All We Know” from Lovers and Other Strangers.)

"I was just looking at your records. You have an awful lot of Frank Sinatra."
The surrogate mother meets (and sizes up) the father

Although I recall when The Baby Maker was originally released, I don’t recall it ever appearing on television or even coming out on video. My reaction to the newspaper ads at the time was likely in line with how they appeared to most people: the film looked like cheap exploitation Drive-In fare. Not that that had ever proved a deterrent to my interest in a movie before. It's just that with both Myra Breckinridge and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls hitting the screens at the same time that year, my reasoning was that if I was going to see vulgar trash, it might as well be big-budget vulgar trash from a major studio.

The opportunity to see The Baby Maker came in 1975 when I was still in high school and working as an usher in San Francisco's Alhambra Theater. The Baby Maker played as the bottom half on a double bill with The Happy Hooker, of all things (although, as the guy who also set up the outdoor advertising, I have to say this was one of our more eye-catching marquees). By this time, Barbara Hershey had officially changed her name to Barbara Seagull (an ill-advised phase which lasted about two years), and hippies in movies were starting to look as quaint as beatniks. Nevertheless, for the week of the film's run, I saw it about three times. And absolutely loved it. 

Tad and Tish
One of the things I like about how the character of Tish is conceived is that she never thinks twice about treating her body as her own property to do with as she wishes. Although she is in an open relationship with her boyfriend Tad (for all of six months), when she decides to be a surrogate, she doesn't seek his permission or approval. The scene where she finally tells him is touching and beautifully played. It feels light-years away from how I imagine the scene would be written today. 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS MOVIE

Before making his directing debut with The Baby Maker, James Bridges was a successful screenwriter who got his start working in television (Bridges wrote one of my all-time favorite episodes of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour: “The Unlocked Window”) and had a background of acting and directing for the theater. Dissatisfied with the quality of the films made from his scripts (The Appaloosa, Colossus: The Forbin Project), Bridges decided that he’d try his hand at directing direct his next screenplay  -“I can fuck ‘em up as good as they can!” The Baby Maker's lead character is based on a woman he and life-partner/business partner Jack Larson knew from a Venice Beach bar called The Carousel. A bohemian, free-spirit type who enjoyed the feeling of being pregnant and made extra money by serving as a surrogate mother for childless couples. 

It's Complicated

The Baby Maker is a twist on the classic triangle, the third party in this instance being recruited in a most impersonal way to participate in a most personal form of interrelation. In those pre-in vitro days, the fact that the surrogate is to be impregnated “the old-fashioned way” may have served as the film's principle gimmick and marketing hook, but The Baby Maker distinguishes itself in the manner in which its sensational premise actually serves as a springboard for a thoughtful examination of culture conflict. The film's humor and heart arise out of the clash of generations, personalities, backgrounds, and the unanticipated emotions arising out of what ostensibly is--in form and function--a business arrangement.

In all, Bridges set a heady task for himself in his first outing as director. And while he’s not always successful in balancing the film's varying shifts in tone or in sustaining the narrative thrust of the story over the length of the film’s running time (sometimes it feels up in the air as to which character's story the film is trying to tell); it does feel as though he's telling a story he believes in. 

 Collin Wilcox made her memorable film debut as Mayella in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962).

Wilcox and director James Bridges have an association that extends back to 1964, when she appeared in the Bridges-penned episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour titled "The Jar" (for which he won an Emmy nomination). In 1965, she had a role in his stage play Bachelor Furnished, and in 1977, Bridges cast her as the mother to his alter-ego character in Bridges' semi-autobiographical film, September 30, 1955.

PERFORMANCES

Critics were divided over The Baby Maker’s overall merits, but the quality of Barbara Hershey’s performance was undisputed. Without a doubt, her performance is the single most distinguished takeaway from the entire film. Barbara Hershey’s real-life hippie-dippy reputation may have blighted her early career (and indeed may have cost her a much-deserved Oscar nod for her role here), but it’s precisely her naturalness in the role that grounds the film. Though her character may have been written as an archetype, it's Hershey who comes across as the real thing. Hers is the film's defining voice and, ultimately, its saving grace.

Hershey, who just the year before gave a truly chilling performance as a sociopath in Frank Perry's shattering Last Summer (1969), gives another incredible performance in this, her 5th film. Always an underrated actress, she is The Baby Maker's Most Valuable Player. In scene after scene, whether it be some bit of dialogue that would sound hokey or laughable coming from someone else or a moment when the film feels to be veering into soapy waters, Hershey’s unselfconscious and nuanced performance moors potential contrivance to truth.

Making his film debut, actor Scott Glenn is very good as Tish's sweet but immature boyfriend. 
In 1980, Glenn would go on to have a featured role in James Bridges' Urban Cowboy

As the middle-class couple, Collin Wilcox and stolidly handsome Sam Groom supply more traditional performances that, by comparison, feel more generic, but both are quite good. (Groom's sizable head and chiseled features made him a natural for the close-up-heavy medium of television, where he found success in the 1970s as the star of the syndicated program Police Surgeon.) 

Wilcox is a standout as Suzanne, playing the character as a pragmatic but somewhat neurotic woman. 

The Baby Maker actually excels in making women the dominant players in the film by placing their unique bonds and relationships front and center, and having their actions move the narrative forward. A young Jeannie Berlin is wonderful as Tish’s outspoken, activist best friend.

Tish uses some of her money to help support her single mom (Phyllis Coates) and her grandmother (Madge Kennedy), who both live in a Venice trailer park. In a sea of post-Easy Rider male-centric buddy films, The Baby Maker is unique for its dominant female perspective. 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

I’m a big believer in the tenet that the engagement of different voices can’t help but result in different stories. The subject matter of The Baby Maker couldn’t be more heterosexual, but as a story written and produced by two gay men, I feel it qualifies as a keen example of Queer Cinema.

For all its progressive ideas, the youth movement and hippie counterculture (at least as it has been depicted in films) has always been woefully male-centric, conventional, and in most cases, downright sexist in its attitudes towards women. For example: The Strawberry Statement, a 1970 film about campus protests, couldn't conceive of anything more important for its female activists to do beyond making Xerox copies of protest pamphlets and doing the marketing. To the best of my recollection, The Baby Maker is one of the few hippie-themed films to present the woman's point of view as the dominant perspective. A genuine woman's perspective, not a fetishized, free-love, heterosexual male gaze fantasy of the sort depicted in films like Chastity, Candy, or There's a Girl in My Soup.

The Baby Maker producer Jack Larson (l.) & director James Bridges met when both appeared as actors in the film Johnny Trouble (1957). Openly gay, they remained lovers/partners till Bridges' death in 1993. Larson passed away in 2015

For its time, The Baby Maker’s feminist perspective, non-sexualized heroine, and unorthodox domestic relationships were a subtle challenge to the heteronormative status quo; something I wholly attribute to the gay sensibilities of its creators. Like the works of playwrights Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee, I think what’s brilliant about Bridges’ screenplay is that it looks at heterosexuality through the projected outsider insights of Queer perception.

In a reversal of a common youth film trope, the male bodies are the
ones exposed and made the object of the female gaze in The Baby Maker

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Being that I was just a child when my family lived in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in the late ‘60s, I tend not to be a very good judge of what passes for the authentic or inauthentic representation of hippie culture in movies. Largely shielded from the sex and drugs side of it all, my kid's-eye-view memory of the era consists largely of its pop-cultural trappings. My nostalgia buttons can be pushed by the most superficial signposts of the era, so even though The Baby Maker takes place in Los Angeles, one of its major perks for me is how often it triggers moments of "I remember that!" memory-jogging that take me back to my San Francisco roots.

Fringed suede/leather jackets were all the rage, and everyone seemed to know how to tie-dye but me.  My elder sister (who really caught the hippie bug) was a whiz, but I tended to use so much bleach that my garments actually disintegrated. Hitchhikers were visible all over San Francisco, but my family was so large (me & 4 sisters) that picking up thumb-trippers was never a practical option, even if my parents were open to it. Which they weren't. This suited me just fine, for The Doors' Riders on the Storm  was being played on the radio at the time, and I'd had the holy hell scared out of me by the lyric "There's a killer on the road..."

War Is Not Healthy For Children & Other Living Things
I remember the many protests and picket-sign slogans of the day, the above being so ubiquitous as to have been used as the poster graphic for the 1971 film Bless the Beasts and the Children. In this scene, Jeannie Berlin (daughter of writer/director Elaine May) leads a protest against a store selling toy guns.

Pop-Top Fashion
From roughly 1965 to 1975, beverage cans came with disposable pop-tops. Hippies, being ecology-minded and all, took to using these aluminum tabs to create fashion and "art." Everything from hats, dresses, and vests were made out of these things. I hope she'll forgive me for ratting on her, but my older sister (Yes, Ms. Tie-dye) made herself a pop-top headband just like this. 

Home Decor
The days of gigantic stereos, door-size coffee tables, and sofas that seat 20

Candles, Candles, Everywhere
Candle stores and vendors were like the Starbucks of the Sixties; you couldn't take two steps on Telegraph Avenue without bumping into one. I had a beloved star-shaped rainbow candle in my room (back when they were, y'know, just rainbows and not my way of coming out to my parents), and, of course, my sister made her own 

The Single Wing Turquoise Bird
How's that for a '60s name? Psychedelic light shows and avant-garde multimedia theater were all the rage. Not only did every youth-culture movie feature at least one sequence of freak-out visuals, but the phenomenon went mainstream with 2001: A Space Odyssey. In The Baby Maker, Tish and her friends attend a light show performance by The Single Wing Turquoise Bird, a real-life performance troupe that is still in existence.

Although it’s one of my favorites, I don't mean to paint The Baby Maker as some kind of undiscovered classic. It’s shot in the flat, undistinguished style of a TV movie, the hippie trappings and dialogue can be a bit distancing, and modern audiences may find the tempo a tad sluggish. But it's notable now for its "my body, my choice" attitude about a woman's personal freedom and pregnancy.

A consistent theme in many of my favorite films is the human need for contact, so I'm a sucker for movies about people who misguidedly assume that independence means the absence of emotional attachments. Lastly, anybody who knows me knows how much I love a good cry at the movies, and the ending of The Baby Maker never fails to get the ol' waterworks going.

 BONUS MATERIAL

The Superman Connection

The Baby Maker producer Jack Larson was best known as cub reporter Jimmy Olson on the TV series The Adventures of Superman from 1952 to 1958. That show's original Lois Lane (1st season only) was actress Phyllis Coates. Larson and Coates remained friends over the years, leading to her being cast in The Baby Maker in the role of Barbara Hersey's mother.

Phyllis Coates, Jack Larson, and Ann Doran in The Adventures of Superman

Phyllis Coates as Patricia's mother

Brenda Sykes (Cleopatra Jones) appears in an unbilled bit part as a woman
with whom Tad shares a joint and a flirtation

In 1985 I got a job as a dance/exercise extra in the virtually unwatchable James Bridges film Perfect, starring John Travolta & Jamie Lee Curtis. Although the aerobics class scenes were shot on location at the Sports Connection gym in West Hollywood, this particular scene was shot months later on a set designed to look exactly like the gym. These reshoots were necessitated by the feeling from the higher-ups that the previously shot aerobic class scenes weren't "sexy enough,"
Aside from having to do something like six hours of pelvic tucks, what's most memorable about this particular sequence is that, after filming had begun, shooting halted in order for the costume people to figure out a way to sew up the legs to Travolta's shorts in order to give him a more pronounced package. When Travolta returned a half-hour later with a more camera-ready crotch, it also appeared that a bit of filler had been added. Jack Larson served as producer on this film as well and was often present on what proved to be a very gay (and happy) set.

Scenes from "The Baby Maker" (1970)

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2017

LAST SUMMER 1969

The occasion of a recent TCM screening of this forgotten minor masterpiece from the late ‘60s jogged my memory back to when the film collaborations of the matrimonial/professional team of director Frank Perry and screenwriter Eleanor Perry represented the bright promise of the New Hollywood. Their films, David and Lisa (1962), The Swimmer (1968), and especially the excellent Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970), felt almost European in their blending of arthouse aesthetics with exploitable, mainstream commercial themes.  

Goodbye, Gidget. Farewell, Frankie and Annette
An awful lot had changed since the release of the final Beach Party movie in 1966

I was 13 years old when Last Summer, and, in truth, I had no business seeing so adult a motion picture at such a young age. I may have had no business seeing it, but I wanted to see it like crazy. But thanks to having a much older sister who served as the accompanying “adult guardian” making possible my admission to a slew of age-inappropriate movie farein previous years—Barbarella, Rosemary’s Baby, Bonnie and Clyde, and Secret Ceremony, to name just a few—I had already convinced myself that I was far too mature an adolescent to waste time on the movies marketed to my age demographic. 

The MPAA movie rating system was in its infancy then (when G, M, R, and X were the designations), and I had self-seriously deemed that anything below an “M” was simply not worth my time. After all, I wasn't a child!

Of course, I know now that this attitude was as much born of fervid sexual curiosity (aka, adolescent horniness) as intellectual inquisitiveness, but when you’re that young, there really isn’t all that much of a difference between the two.

Last Summer premiered in New York with an X-rating. By the time it opened
in San Francisco two months later, it had been edited down to an R-rating

The release of Last Summer was on my radar because I had read that it was to be given an X-rating, and back then, to me, X-rated meant sophisticated. To my mind it was a rating that, in keeping with the critical and boxoffice success of the recent X-rated release Midnight Cowboy (1969), held the promise of being just the start of a whole slew of Hollywood movies made for grown-ups (and me, of course) that were free to tell important, contemporary stories unencumbered by the constraints of censorship or the worry of meeting the bland criteria of "wholesome family entertainment."

And indeed, for a time, that appeared to be the case. There came a string of films with intriguingly elevated themes that fell under the X-rating umbrella: Greetings! (1968), The Damned (1969), Medium Cool (1969), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Last Tango in Paris(1972). But soon the “X” rating was appropriated by the porn industry, and whatever chance an "X-rating" had of signifying hands-off censorship interference was short-lived.  

Barbara Hershey as Sandy

Richard Thomas as Peter

Bruce Davison as Dan

Catherine Burns as Rhoda

I saw both Midnight Cowboy and Last Summer within months of each other, and the reason I'm harping on the whole "X-rated" thing is that it became part of Last Summer's lore, and contributed to a lot of misremembering on my part. At the time, everyone was talking about these two high-profile, controversial, X-rated features. John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy maintained its X for the duration of its run, but Last Summer, after playing briefly in NYC with the "X" tag, Frank Perry agreed to delete a couple of swear words and a few frames from the film's harrowing climax to give his film an R-rating before going into wide release. 

What TCM screened a few weeks ago was said to be the R-rated theatrical release from 1969, and likely the same film I saw back then. But over the years, there have been so many edited versions of Last Summer in circulation (remarkably, I don't think it ever had a VHS or DVD release) that I have my doubts. This isn't helped by my having two bootleg versions of the film, one running about a minute and forty some seconds longer than the other. (The extended time seems due to longer shots in the final sequence. The longer version is recognizable by the inclusion of Bruce Davidson's line "She's gonna swallow her braces," after Barbara Hershey's remark "You look like you're gonna choke.")

This shot, part of an extended verbal exchange, was missing, along with several other brief cuts
to this sequence, from the version of  Last Summer broadcast on TCM 

So, despite what I do and don't remember about the version I saw back in 1970, at least we know there are at least two different cuts of Last Summer floating around. 

Both Midnight Cowboy and Last Summer received high praise from critics, Midnight Cowboy going on to make history as the first (and to date only) X-rated movie to win an Academy Award for Best Picture. But somehow, Last Summer, despite having garnered a Best Supporting Actress nod for newcomer Catherine Burns, and launching the long careers of its other young stars, managed to fall through the cracks. All but forgotten due to the film's unavailability. 

Affluent teens vacationing on Fire Island with their disinterested parents 

bond after saving the life of an injured seagull

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 presented as a state of proto-barbarism. Where the youthful cry for "freedom" is met with the notion that, if left to their own devices, would the Love Generation be any less savage than the Over-30 set?

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

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, tending to a wounded seagull on the beach (Sandy: Well you asked me, so don’t think I’m boasting, but my IQ is 157.”) 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 outsider who insinuates herself into the fold.

The vulnerable don't stand much of a chance with this crowd. Rhoda is introduced committing a simple act of deceny (which already makes her a misfit): she tries to get the trio to stop tormenting the seagull they're attempting to turn 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. 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.

In Rhoda, Sandy finds another "project" ...like the seagull. 

Here, Rhoda models the update from her "old lady" bathing suit 

Last Summer's poignancy is derived from the realization that, what with all four teens coming from broken or troubled homes, they could have been helpful to one another, and that the summer would wind up being memorable to them for a lot of good reasons. But, being at its heart an existential parable on power, hurt people hurting others, and the question of whether cruelty is a choice or an instinct, Last Summer leaves our young protagonists irrevocably changed, and unlikely for the better. 

"You have an unmapped face. It doesn't come right out
and say what's going to become of it."

The gentle connection that Rhoda and Peter begin to develop stands to threaten the dynamic of "the trio." 

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 marvelous example of how fascinating American movies were becoming in the late-60's, early-'70s when they began to venture into realms of storytelling that were not overtly tethered to their commercial potential. 

Sure, there's always the marketable angle of sensationalism, and films like Last Summer were more than willing to make their boldness and daring a part of their marketing. 

But what made the films of this era different from those released even a few years earlier (and, sadly, just a decade later) was their willingness to go to the darker places of the American myth and challenge our concepts of ourselves and the world we live in. 

So often, I find movies today tend to feed us comforting images of ourselves and set out to reinforce tissue-thin myths we harbor about everything from gender 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, proposing, in the exposure, that we have the potential to do and be better.  

Again, the vulnerable are seen as targets, not subjects of empathy

Last Summer doesn't shy away from the exposing the privileged arrogance of the of these blond teens who, sheltered in their all-white enclaves make comic/idiotic jokes in the contrived slave dialect of Gone With the Wind, or, in this painful scene, make blantantly 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 of 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 a visibly forced, "beer as truth serum" sequence that gives credence to Hershey's claim years later 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.

When Last Summer was released, the entire cast was applauded for their performances, but it was Catherine Burns who emerged as the breakout “star,” garnering the lion's share of the film's best reviews and Last Summer's sole Academy Award nomination. Though reunited with Richard Thomas in 1971's Red Sky at Morning (a film I haven’t seen), Hollywood didn't seem to know what to do with her, and so after being wasted in a few TV movies and disposable roles in episodics, she bowed out of the industry for good, becoming a published author. She passed away in 2019.

The role of Mr. Caudell, Sandy's sexual assaulter dubbed "Snow White" due to his inability to tan, is played by character actor Peter Turgeon. Recognizable to fans of Airport (1970) as the annoying passenger who eventually gets slapped by a priest. 

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, Hershey's impressive and enduring career includes BAFTA and Oscar nominations. 

Barbara Hershey (born Barbara Hertzstein) briefly changed her name to Barbara Seagull out of guilt surrounding the death of the seagull that was accidentally killed during the filming (the scenes involving the bird are another reason why Last Summer is a very unsettling affair).

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 marriage equality, it all fits and 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 it's such a shame this film is so hard to track down. 

That Sandy would most likely be happiest were Dan and Pete to be somehow merged into one person feeds the already heady homoerotic sexual tension that exists within this tripartite friendship.

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 and Eleanor Perry's best films (and Frank Perry doesn't deserve to be remembered in perpetuity for being the man who gave us Mommie Dearest and Monsignor,  does he?), but I also think it's one of the more important and representative films of a significant era in American film.  

Scene from "Last Summer" (1969)

BONUS MATERIAL

I read Evan Hunter’s 1968 novel Last Summer not long after seeing the film. Eleanor Perry’s screenplay is surprisingly faithful to the source material, and it's every bit as disturbing as the film. The 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, Evan Hunter wrote a sequel to Last Summer titled Come Winter. I don't know if any significance should be placed on the fact that while I read it much more recently than Last Summer, I nevertheless can't recall a thing about it. 

A deleted scene from Last Summer featuring Ralph Waite as Pete's father. Waite and Thomas would go on to appear on TV as father and son for five seasons of The Waltons.

The Manor (2021)
Bruce Davison and Barbara Hershey were reunited as co-stars for this Gothic horror film set in a retirement home. Oh, if only some clever writer had thought to make this an extended sequel to Last Summer. Would Dan and Sandy have changed?  Would that summer have scarred them for life? 

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009- 2013