SUMMER OF '42

(April 1971, U.S.)

Writing about Robert Mulligan's SUMMER OF '42 is an emotional challenge because it forces me to face a part of my past that I still carry around like a deep scar. For thirty-eight years, my family had a home in the town of Westhampton Beach, Long Island, and not too unlike Hermie (played by Gary Grimes) of this wonderful film, the house and the inlet that it resided on, came to define who I was as a boy, a teenager, and a man. Like Hermie, who narrates to us at the beginning of the film, "There weren't as many houses or people as there are now. The geography of the island and the singularity of the sea were far more noticeable then.", I look back at my own past in that small seaside town of the Hamptons and recall who I was and why every detail of my surroundings mattered to me and why. In effect, I was no too unlike that young man who sits on the dune staring out into the loneliness of the open sea and the rustic, isolated beach house belonging to the young woman who would change his life forever...

Bear in mind, however, that despite all of the haunting beauty and mystery of SUMMER OF '42, this film is still, at heart, a coming-of-age story of three best friends and their confusion, their wonderment and their puzzlement in the world of adolescent sex. It's summertime, the kids are on the beach, and the girls are wearing bathing suits that reveal just enough of their bodies to send young men like Hermie and Oscy into a frenzy about how, when and where they'll "cop a feel" or even manage to experience something new they've read about in a sex book called foreplay. Of the three best friends who call themselves "the terrible trio", Oscy (played by Jerry Houser) is the most dominating and the most immature of them all, and it's interesting, if not intriguing to learn that he's the one who manages to lose his virginity first to a young, pretty blonde he met while at the movies one night with his friends. Hermie, while still full of every traditional adolescent form of confusion and stupidity, is the more mature one who easily recognizes his own deep feelings of infatuation and frustration when he first lays eyes on and meets the beautiful, young (and married) Dorothy (played by Jennifer O'Neill) who lives in the house by the ocean. She's not just another girl of the neighborhood, but rather a mature woman (she's actually only twenty-two) who brings out a part of himself that he's never known before. As he also narrates to us at the beginning of the film, "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." Consider those words carefully and try to imagine just how some people, even in passing, have managed to affect the outcome of whom we'd later become in life. Even while Hermie gets to know Dorothy by carrying her groceries and placing boxes up in the attic for her, he's also a young man with a very horny imagination toward her, even if she only regards him as just a nice, considerate boy from the neighborhood.

SUMMER OF '42 also serves to remind us just how insane and how much fun the tender age of fifteen can be to a boy. Who among us young men can't remember just how nervous we might have been the first time we walked into a pharmacy to try and purchase condoms residing behind the check-out counter. Some of us may have even sat next to a girl at the movies and tried very subtly (and even slyly) to move our hand up and over her shoulder and fix it on just the right place where we could feel her breast without any objections, though I seriously doubt any of us were clueless enough to squeeze the poor girl's arm instead, as Hermie manages to do while Bette Davis and Paul Henreid are up on the screen in NOW, VOYAGER. That classic film within a film helps to remind us that this is the year 1942, and despite any similarities in boyhood antics between now and then, there is still a great degree of innocence and ignorance among boys who know nothing about sex. What we may now know today as the "natural order of progression" of sexual activities, would have likely seemed very different back then and may have actually required the step-by-step teachings that the three boys read about in a book that Benjie (played by Oliver Conant) has swiped from his mother's book shelf. It's amusing to think that Oscy is going to rely on the twelve steps of "foreplay" the book endorses, but on the other hand, they do work as he manages to get laid (twice) on the beach at night during a seemingly innocent marshmallow roast.

So, as the film's pharmacist says, "fun is fun", and while the summer antics of the "terrible trio" may be the main focus of the film, there is still the very haunting romance that inevitably takes place between Hermie and Dorothy. Let us be reminded that the world is at war, and young men die in war. One night, when Hermie shows up at Dorothy's house, it is eerily quiet inside. He discovers on her living room table, a bottle of whiskey and a Western Union telegram from the United States government informing her that her husband has been killed in action. Dorothy's been crying and it's with Hermie's simple words of, "I'm sorry", that things begin between them. During the course of this moment, no words are spoken. We hear only the waves of the ocean outside and the film's beautiful theme by Michel Legrand playing on the phonograph as Dorothy takes Hermie by the hand and leads him to her bedroom, where she draws him into bed with her and they very gently make love with each other. When it's over, she's withdrawn again into her world of pain and anguish and only says, "Good night, Hermie." when he tries to approach her. I can only say that I have known love and love making on the beach, both on screen and in my own life, and yet nothing has every haunted me as much as the visual and emotional interaction that takes place between Hermie and Dorothy in this moment of SUMMER OF '42. It also haunts me that the film leaves us just as dazed and confused as Hermie is when he returns the next morning to discover that Dorothy has fled the island in the night and left him only a note with her final words to her. On paper, they're words of comfort, but the fail to leave him (or us) with any sense of hope or resolution. Perhaps all we're really left with in the end is the hope of our own manhood.

Let me also point out the bizarre irony we've just witnessed in this entire love making scene. By today's modern legal and moral standards, Dorothy is a female pedophile who has just committed an act of statutory rape against a minor. But it's also very bizarre irony that to even take the time to consider such an act, though legally viable as it may be, seems inappropriate, if not indecent, for such a beautiful, haunting and memorable piece of cinema that helped to make Jennifer O'Neill the star she became.

Now, let me tell you about my own personal "Summer of '82". Like Hermie, I was fifteen years-old and spending the summer at the beach with my family. Across the street from our house was a public beach and on it was an eighteen year-old blonde lifeguard who worked there every day (I can't remember her name). Like Hermie, I looked for any excuse to go to that beach every day and speak to her. Even as I sat next to her lifeguard chair saying mindless and pointless adolescent jibber-jabber, all the while I kept fantasizing about what it would be like to touch her and hold her in her white bathing suit and what it would be like to have her touch and hold me. Unlike Hermie, of course, nothing ever happened because in her eyes, I was still just a kid. Still, they are boyish, horny memories that I continue to live with and reflect upon whenever the mood of nostalgia hits me. She was never "my Dorothy", but she was an example and a reminder of what it meant to once be a boy trying so hard to grow into a man.

Favorite line or dialogue:

Hermie as narrator (voice-over): "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. Benjie broke his watch, Oscy gave up the harmonica, and in a very special way, I lost Hermie forever."