You ever finish watching a movie and you find yourself so energized and excited that you have to walk around a while and contemplate what you just saw? Last Summer is that movie for me.
It's the story of three teenagers, two guys (Richard Thomas and Bruce Davison) and a girl (Barbara Hershey) who fall in love and form a tight threesome over the course of the summer after bonding over a wounded seagull. It's all about sex without any of the intercourse. It's not The Dreamers. When a fourth character, a shy and nervous girl (Catherine Burns, who was nominated for an Oscar for this role, and should have won for her devestating monologue alone) their tight dynamic of friendship turns alternately generous and cruel towards her. They let her in, but they don't let her in.
In it's brief 95 minutes I saw every major event, relationship, and emotion of my years 14 to 18 depicted in some sort of fashion. This is a film where I identify so heavily with every character, both good and bad traits, that at times, it was actually hard viewing it objectively as a story. It's probably the most honest movie about adolescence I've ever seen. It captures so many intense emotions, from sexual tension to cruelty to the unbridled joy of total freedom, in such simple ways. What makes Last Summer work so well is a script that forgoes plot for elegant character arcs. For me, those years are all about the arcs. You grow together and apart from so many different people as a teenager, and those relationships can form and break in such different ways. Emotions get messy, people are constantly running games on each other to the point where I don't even think the characters know if what they say to each other is true or not.
My one sticking point is the ending. I won't spoil it for you, but I wasn't completely convinced it was earned. Then again, I'm not completely convinced it wasn't. It's something I'll need to chew for a while. Watching the film again, knowing where it ends, will certainly give it a different perspective.
That this movie is so hard to find is one of the tragedies of the film world. It's not on DVD (it's not even listed on Netflix) and a VHS copy is fifty dollars on Amazon. I can't even find a trailer on YouTube*. I saw this because TCM played it as part of their 31 Days of Oscar and I DVR'd it on a whim. It was one of the best whims I ever had. But even the copy shown on TCM was in pretty poor shape, with plenty of scratches, a few audio problems and (most damning of all) in full-screen. I can't find the aspect ratio information on IMDB, so I'm not sure if what I saw was pan and scanned, open matte (this feels most likely) or how the film was actually shown in theaters. But regardless, it's probably as high quality a copy of this film I will ever see, so I am saving it on my DVR until that's no longer the case.
When the film was first released in 1969, it was given an X rating until a certain scene was edited of some offensive content. This R rated version was what was released on VHS. I'm not sure if what I saw was the X or R rated version, but I'm fairly certain the missing footage wouldn't affect my (and by extension, your) opinion of the film.
Despite it's hard to see, impossible to find status, I beg everyone here to be aware of it, and be on the look out. Maybe TCM will show it again. Maybe another movie channel. But be on the look-out for this amazing amazing movie. It's an undiscovered gem and the thing about undiscovered gems is that they should be discovered.
Last Summer may have usurped Annie Hall as my new favorite movie. I don't know if this means anything to you but it's pretty big for me.
*I did find a few out of context scenes, but they're not the kind of scenes that would really work out of context. I'll present them to you anyway, though, in hopes that they somehow pique your interest:
