Last Summer
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- For the song by Welsh band Lostprophets, see Last Summer (song)
Last Summer is a 1969 coming-of-age movie about adolescent sexuality. Director Frank Perry filmed at Fire Island locations with a cast of Catherine Burns, Barbara Hershey, Bruce Davison and Richard Thomas. The memorable performance by Burns brought her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress, and she won a Kansas City Film Critics Circle Award. Her career continued for another 15 years until she dropped out of sight.
Eleanor Perry's screenplay was based on the novel by Evan Hunter. The film follows the random activities of four teens during a summer on Fire Island. Rhoda (Catherine Burns) is shy and overweight and targeted for teasing by the others. As sexual tensions increase, the more experienced Sandy (Barbara Hershey) encourages Dan (Bruce Davison) and Peter (Richard Thomas) to rape Rhoda.
Vincent Canby reviewed the film June 11, 1969 in the New York Times:
- Early in the season at Fire Island, Sandy (Barbara Hershey), Peter (Richard Thomas) and Dan (Bruce Davison) form a sort of post-pubescent, Little Orphan Annie Secret Code Club. As they swim, sail, and rehabilitate a wounded seagull (both bird and symbol), the friendship seems a funny, almost perfect, trilateral agreement. At first, each seems indistinguishable from the others, although the boys are blond and Sandy has long, dark hair. When they go on sandwich dates to the movies. Peter has the freedom of one breast, Dan the other, and sometimes the hands of all three intertwine in sweaty communion in Sandy's lap. It's all very bland and innocent until the three personalities begin to define themselves. Peter is the basically nice one. Dan may one day be a handsome, Madison Avenue alcoholic, and Sandy's beauty, wit and high I.Q. disguise a neurotic child who may actually be psychotic. After the seagull, recuperated and tamed, turns on her, she calmly takes it into the woods and bashes its brains out. Into this closed community wanders Rhoda (Cathy Burns), a rather sweet, lonely 15-year-old girl who mouths psychoanalytic jargon with all the assurance of a desperate spinster. By destroying her, Sandy and Peter and Dan effectively lock themselves into aimless adolescence for life.
Roger Ebert wrote a very favorable review of Last Summer, published August 16,1969:
- As Last Summer opens we are introduced to three affluent teen-agers, two boys and a girl, who are spending the summer on Fire Island with their parents. Sandy, the girl, is more familiar and experienced with sex than the boys, or so she would have them believe. The two boys are, naturally, unsure of themselves. They are not men and yet must be concerned with manhood. In the hot sun, during the long summer, the three friends circle the knowledge of sex like skittish colts. But the movie is not really about them. It is about Rhoda, a plump and painfully idealistic girl from Ohio, who is also staying on the island. She forces herself into the group, her loneliness overcoming her shyness. And although she seems the most insecure of them all, she is the only one who knows her own mind and whose decisions are not determined by insecurity... Sandy and the two boys sit on the beach, drinking beer, fooling around, skirting the awareness of their own new sexuality. During this scene the friends become unequal; Sandy is now in control. Another scene: A rainy day. Sandy, Peter and Dan experiment with pot. On an impulse, they wash each other's hair. They talk. They kill time, Rhoda arrives and feels excluded by the camaraderie. They convince her to tell "the worst thing" in her life. Reluctantly, she does; in a brilliantly acted monolog, she describes the death of her mother by drowning. The way Rhoda's ambiguous feelings are presented makes this the best scene in the film.
The film had a soundtrack LP (Warner Bros.-Seven Arts WS 1791) of the score composed by John Simon and Collin Walcott. Heard on the soundtrack: John Simon (piano), Collin Walcott (sitar, tamboura), Aunt Mary's Transcendental Slip and Lurch Band (rock band), Cyrus Faryar (voice), Buddy Bruno (voice), Ray Draper (tuba, voice), Electric Meatball (rock band), Henry Diltz (banjo, voice), Bad Kharma Dan and the Bicycle Brothers (motorcycle gang).
Rated X when first released, Last Summer was given a rating of R after edits to the rape scene. The cut version is the one seen in the videotape release.
