Summer of '42

Summer of '42 (Robert Mulligan, 1971) 

 

Nothing from that first day I saw her and no one that has happened to me since, has ever been as frightening and as confusing. For no person I've ever known has ever done more to make me feel more sure, more insecure, more important and less significant.

 

 Herman Raucher's remembrance of growing up an adolescent (the word "teenager" wasn't in common usage yet) in the early days of America's involvement in WWII and being lost between the worlds of youngsters and adulthood was a huge hit when it was released to theaters (despite little promotional fanfare). But, strong word of mouth made it popular*, and as the Warner Brothers had no confidence in it at all—director Robert Mulligan (who also provided the narration) barely eked a million dollar budget out of them—it made an inordinate amount of profit.

 

Audiences were in a romantic mood. Love Story had been a huge hit six months previously, and when Summer of '42 was released in April of '71, American audiences were still in a bit of a lovesick delirium. And Summer of '42, despite its emphasis on the horny bantering teens that make up the majority of the film, it is best remembered for its love story, aided and abetted by Robert Surtees' dreamlike cinematography and Michel Legrand's tentatively yearning (if extremely spare score).

The story is all about "Hermie" (Gary Grimes) "Oscy" (Jerry Houser) and "Benjie" (Oliver Conant), vacationing with their families on Nantucket Island in the first Summer of U.S. involvement in the war. The boys are 14 years old and they spend their days on the beach playing war-games, and ogling the local girls. They're already planning how to join the Army and/or "get laid," the latter being the (in their minds) most easily attained. "Oscy," the most impatient for both occurrences is the most persistent, hoping to score with the local girls—any of them, really—and is hardly aware that "Hermie" only has eyes for "Dorothy" (Jennifer O'Neill), married to a service-man, about to be shipped off to the European theater.

While the boys are conspiring and having deep discussions about acquiring "rubbers" and timing "feels" and poring over medical books for details, Hermie's interest in the sex education is to appear more mature and less a boy in the eyes of Dorothy, and given his propensity to "hover" nearby, the two start crossing orbits—it's a small island and, as I said, he's usually in her vicinity—and he begins being helpful, helping her with "man" stuff, like carrying her groceries...or anything...just to be near her.

29 years passed between Raucher's summer of '42 and the appearance of Summer of '42 in theaters (although Raucher wrote it in the 1950's and, in his words, "couldn't give it away" then). Almost double that amount of years have passed since its release, and things and morés have changed. At the time of the film's release, the film was seen as a coming-of-age story with a bittersweet ending about love gained and loves lost, with a lot of goofy adolescence hi-jinks for humor.

But now, at this point and time, movie-Hermie seems more like a stalker...and Dorothy's actions? They're something she might be prosecuted for, however one sentimentalizes it.** "Circumstances" may be argued and motivations considered, but, the way the movie presents it, it's a good thing that Dorothy gets out of town before the insulated island begins to suspect anything. Sure, I'm a jerk for mentioning it, and it's certainly not in the romantic spirit in which the movie wants me to wallow, but there are "circumstances" and then there are "consequences"...in the real world, if not in the rarefied movie-world that Raucher and Mulligan present. The studio even had some initial cold-feet: the film was raunchy enough to be rated "R" (restricted from those under 17—so the kids portrayed in the movie wouldn't have been able to see it!), although after its initial release, it was changed to a "PG" rating for suburban theater runs without a single frame of film being cut.

Mulligan's work as director comes through extraordinarily clearly—he was able to coax lived-in performances out of his players that they rarely ever again achieved, whether it was Natalie Wood, Sandy Dennis, or the parade of kids he directed from To Kill a Mockingbird all the way up to Reese Witherspoon in The Man in the Moon. Here, both Gary Grimes and Jennifer O'Neill make career-launching performances that they couldn't equal, subsequently, and he pushed Jerry Houser into a manic-comedy highlight that the actor subsequently leavened in later appearances. And Mulligan's live-television history inspired his "go-for-broke" perfect camera placement without ever making a show of it. Mulligan's movies have the "lived-in" quality of place that make you feel that you've been there before, even if it's your first time. His movies "feel" real. But, usually, without the earnestness of sentimentality.

The sentimentality if where Raucher comes in, but he does get one thing very right—he, after all, represented it best by his 29 year obsession with it—that such encounters of the significantly heart-felt kind can last a long time, and mark the sea-change between lust and love—is there any difference to a 14 year old boy?—until things get serious and one starts thinking about someone else rather than themselves. If we're going to get all soppy about "manhood" that's where growing up is achieved. Not in the sack, but in the soul.

Whatever these matters, Summer of '42 hit a collective chord and was an unexpected box office hit, admired by many—in fact, it's a favorite film of such disparate directors as Stanley Kubrick (in The Shining, the Torrence family can be seen watching it) and Quentin Tarantino.

 

I was never to see her again. Nor was I ever to learn what became of her. We were different then. Kids were different. It took us longer to understand the things we felt. Life is made up of small comings and goings. And for everything we take with us, there is something that we leave behind. In the summer of '42, we raided the Coast Guard station four times, we saw five movies, and had nine days of rain. Benji broke his watch, Oscy gave up the harmonica, and in a very special way, I lost Hermie forever.

* There's a lot of irony here—much to author Raucher's favor. The film's small budget didn't allow much pay for the writing of the screenplay, and the author was enticed to take a back-end deal, where he'd be paid 10% from the profits of the film's theatrical release. It was an easy deal for Warner Bros. studio to make—they didn't think the movie would make any money. But, during the film's post-production, Raucher was encouraged to write a novel based on his screenplay to maybe help the box-office. Raucher's novel—a thick, much-expanded version of the script—concentrating on the boys' more than the Hermie-Dorothy story-line (which had always been Raucher's intention: he wanted to pay tribute to his friend Oscar, who, in reality, was killed in the Korean War—on Raucher's birthday, in fact, which he hasn't celebrated since). Raucher wrote it in a month's time, and when it was released, became a "runaway" best-seller—whether by actual public interest or studio "priming" is unsure—spending a good block of 1971 on the New York Times Best-Seller list, both before and after the movie's run in theaters. And it's still available, under the Barnes & Noble imprint. With the success of the book and the unexpected success of the movie, Raucher made an awful lot of money.

 

** People who love the movie will be offended that I bring this up. "How dare you?" Because it's the reality of the situation, when looked at, free of the gauze of romantic gooeyness. Summer of '42 is like a male-weepy version of An Affair To Remember in that regard. It takes a hard heart and a sense of realism to look at it with clear—un-teary—eyes. Credit Mulligan's artistry for that.  But, then the film is more blatant: it implies that something sexual happened between Hermy and Dorothy. Raucher's book and his memory of the incident was one of shared grief and intimacy, but no sexual congress. But, the movie? It wants you to "go there."

Scanners

It's October..."so maybe I should pay attention to horror films." How cliché.

I have some planned and in the hopper, but I noticed "The Large Association of Movie Blogs" is showcasing director David Cronenberg, so I'm also going to be throwing in a bunch of Cronenberg reviews from the past and the retrospective present. After all, you can't have a Cronenberg movie without a little bit of horror...somewhere.

Scanners (David Cronenberg, 1981) You can weaponize anything. But, I wonder if David Cronenberg knew when he was writing and directing Scanners that the United States military was (seriously) investigating the use of psychic abilities for intelligence and warfare at Forts Mead and Bragg. The programs, dubbed "The Stargate Project" were documented by Jon Ronson in the book "The Men Who Stare at Goats," which was made into a film in 2009. No one that I've read has made the connection, and evidently Cronenberg's initial concept was far afield from what was finally put on-screen; so the film could be used as a tax write-off, it was rushed into production forcing last-minute scripting while filming. And, it isn't the military that is doing the experimentation, it's a corporate interest specializing in private security—a sort of pre-Blackwater in the world of the Military-Industrial Complex. Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss. And trust Cronenberg to be ahead of the curve in terms of paranoia and conspiracies.

There is an "issue" at ConSec: at a conference in which they were announcing the use of "scanners"—agents with psychic and telekinetic abilities, a demonstration was called for and a volunteer from the audience came to the stage. Rather than providing a number from 1 to 100 for the scanner to predict, the volunteer, a scanner named Revok (Michael Ironside) psychically assaulted the Consec agent causing his head to explode, resulting, as the ConSec chairman says "in six corpses and substantial loss in credibility for our organization." And all without a bone-saw. ConSec security chief Braeden Keller (Lawrence Dane) suggests, for the good of the company, that the "scanner" program be halted, but he is overruled by Dr. Paul Ruth (Patrick MacGoohan), who has identified Revok from CCTV footage; Revok has acquired defector scanners from ConSec and has started his own band of rival scanning rogues. 

But Dr. Ruth has a plan: he has picked up a drifter named Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack) who has been arrested for stealing food and giving a woman who gives him the stink-eye a seizure. Ruth wants to work with Vale to oppose Revok and possibly infiltrate his network. Vale has been unhinged by his abilities, but Ruth injects him with a drug he's developed called "ephemerol" (heh) that negates Vale's powers and keeps him sedate.

Vale has been homeless because his scanning abilities has made him anti-social, not knowing where they came from, but once Vale explains his gifts and shows him others with his abilities, he is able to recruit Vale for his efforts. He also helps him to channel his abilities, and is astonished by the power that Vale demonstrates when he drastically increases the heart-beat of a yoga master who has trained himself to keep it low. Ruth sets Vale a task—to find other scanners and his link to them might be through sculptor Benjamin Pierce, himself a scanner.

"I'm thinking of a number between 1 and 100..." "Uuhh...No. 6?"

But, Revok has hired assassins to follow Lark to Pierce, and while Pierce is very angrily reluctant to help Lark, they are interrupted by Revok's killers who shoot Pierce—Lark uses his abilities to kill the shooters and reads from Pierce's dying mind a name: "Kim Obrist."*

Obrist (Jennifer O'Neill) is a scanner herself—there seem to be a lot of these folks (where do they come from?) and she has her own band of unaffiliated scanners. Vale attends a meeting of her group and—wouldn't you know it (especially if you have ESP!)—more of Revok's killers show up and take out Obrist's group, but Obrist is able to use her mind to kill the assassins, making them burst into flame. Lark compels the one surviving assassin to lead him to Revok and he is given a vial with the name "Biocarbon Amalgamate." Lark takes it upon himself to keep Obrist safe, but tracks down the BioCarbon facility, where he discovers it is run by Revok and they are controlling shipments of ephemerol through a ConSec program called "RIPE" and Vale contacts Ruth of what he's found out. On Ruth's instructions, Lark brings Obrist to Consec, where she is injected with ephemerol and taken by Keller to be interrogated.

So, as things gets increasingly more complicated, they also get more contained and insular, and this is where Scanners has its big drawbacks. I'm sure that the concentration of scanners in one city has more to do with budgetary considerations than any sort of story logic, but, be that as it may, it doesn't explain why it takes so darned long for Vale (or Ruth) to realize that there is probably a traitor in their midst as Revok's infiltration of the ConSec systems are so complete. You would think that folks with such enhanced brains and abilities might figure any of this out before it turns into such a murderous problem, but Cronenberg, given the constraints of time and budget is more concerned with stunning visuals than story logic.

Those "stunning visuals" (most created by make-up legend Dick Smith—he of The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Little Big Man, and The Exorcist) create the sense that anything is possible with the abilities of the Scanners—except for figuring anything out and having to rely on sleuthing like a normal person. The abilities are convenient when the script calls for them to be, but pretty useless in the main. And that's a major flaw. It's enough to make a critic's head explode.

The performances are all over the map: Lack is okay, but largely unsympathetic in an opaque kind of way—he was probably hired because he looks like he could be a derelict but also clean up real nice. O'Neill is one of those actresses that relies more on looks than personality, and she is mostly required to look earnest, like she is covering up a deep, dark secret (SPOILER ALERT: she isn't). MacGoohan, as usual, in inscrutable, an actor who's always had the ability to portray smarter even if the character doesn't call for it, merely by an ironic half-smile. On the other end of the spectrum is  Ironside. He's the master of excess, for whom subtlety seems to be a waste of time—one would say he'd be better suited for silent pictures, but even there he'd be over-the-top. His Revok is both malevolent and insane, so much so that one wonders if he could be capable of being in charge of anything if he didn't have the ability of mind control. 

Scanners is rather dumb, despite its considerable displays of brain-power. And it is giddily gruesome—as Cronenberg gleefully can be. I mean, a guy's head explodes within the first 15 minutes—and it gets worse from there. I've called Cronenberg the Enemy to the Squeamish and it is never more evident than it is in Scanners. One should hold onto one's head...or, at least, their lunch.

* Kim Obrist is listed as an assistant to producer Claude Heroux in the credits.