Hermie (Gary Grimes) and his friends Oscy and Benjie are New York City teenagers spending their summer vacation on Nantucket Island (changed to Packett Island in the novel), in 1942. The grown-up world is at war, but for these boys, the focus is love not war, and the mysteries of the opposite sex.Eagerly looking forward to his first sexual encounter, Hermie finds himself falling in love with an older woman Dorothy (Jennifer O'Neill), the lovely, young wife of an Army Air Corps pilot. When her husband goes back to war, Dorothy and Hermie form a gentle bond of friendship and mutual support, but when she receives the tragic news of her husband's fate, Dorothy reaches out to Hermie to console her.
[Blogger's comments:] This is a tender, sensitively-crafted film that has the power to reconnect us with the memories of our own youthful emotional and sexual yearnings. Personally, having been born in the summer of '42 while the world was at war, and having spent many summers on Cape Cod during the 1940s and 1950s, this poignant, bittersweet romance resonates especially strongly within me.
In 2002, novelist and screenwriter Herman Hermie Raucher revealed in a Scripps Treasure Coast Publishing interview that, after the 1971 release of Summer of '42 he had received a letter from Dorothy in which she expressed her hope that Hermie could forget her and move on with his life. Since she did not include a return address, or even her last name, there was no way for Hermie to contact her, and so she was lost to him forever. Since Dorothy was probably 22 in 1942, she was born around 1920 and so has almost certainly passed away. Herman Raucher was born in April, 1928 and passed away in December, 2023 at age 95. And so the story of Hermie and Dorothy has ended.
Labels: comedy, drama, rom-drama-faves, romance, teenager, tragedy, WWII
Internet Movie Database 7.2/10
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=61, viewers=76)
Blu-ray
Official Jennifer O’Neill Website
Summer of '42 - Music by Michel Legrand; video of Jennifer O'Neill
Theme from "Summer of '42" (The Summer Knows)
Filming Locations YouTube video
Ending Scene
MetaScore (critics=59, viewers=68)
Yesterday's Island - Today's Nantucket
Summer of '42 - From Film to Book June 16, 2016
Growing pains on Packett Island
by Richard Bradford, May 21, 1971
New York Times
If we are to believe Herman Raucher - and I suppose we are to believe him, since his 15‐year‐old protagonist is named Hermie and the author seems quite at home inside Hermie's head - boys in their middle teens think constantly of sex, plan endless sexual escapades that never happen, find sexual overtones in all that surrounds them, including everyday events and homely artifacts. Even the young Alex Portnoy had an occasional intrusive day‐dream about baseball. Hermie has settled into his preoccupation with admirable fidelity.
Hermie and his friends Oscy and Benjie, fellow‐refugees from New York, are spending the summer of 1942 on Packett Island. (Their parents are there, too, shadow figures in the gritty beach cottages.) They are an untidy threesome - profane, silly, unformed and erratic. Their summer together is one of loose comradeship, beach bumming, inconclusive fist fights and the painful, constant feeling that they are nobodies, too old to be little boys, too young to be men.
Hermie, however, is in love - genuinely, poetically, profoundly in love - with a young married woman in one of the cottages. She is the leading lady of his erotic fantasies, the heroine of his quests, the bubbles in his soda pop. Her name is Dorothy; she is a goddess.
Those of us who were once fifteen will recall that our goddesses seldom returned our adolescent passions, and so it is with Hermie. He wants to speak to Dorothy in pastoral iambics - but, when he confronts her, babbles of the weather. He carries her groceries, helps her store heavy objects in the attic, drinks her scalding coffee without complaint, and plays the goofiest mooncalf in Maine.
At the urging of Oscy (whose libido follows a more practical path) Hermie joins him in a plan that is likelier to pay off than the hopeless campaign for Dorothy's attention. At the movies, they latch onto Aggie and Miriam, a pair of gum‐chewers who represent reasonable targets for amatory assault.
It is in the following scenes that Mr. Raucher scores most tellingly. His recall of nervous teen‐aged gaucheries is dead accurate, hilarious, tinged with sadness because of the terrible earnestness of the boys in their roles as crafty seducers. These are the true milestones that marked the road of adolescent development in the 1940's, and still may: the tangled necking scene in the back row of the movie theater, all perspiring hands and popcorn; the mind‐numbing, pre‐Pill embarrassment of buying contraceptives at the village pharmacy; the romantic culmination of a beach‐blanket party, with bonfire and haunting moon. Unfortunately, the lewd promise of this crisis so paralyzes Hermie's will that he can do nothing but toast marshmallows and force them down the throat of his puzzled companion, until she waddles home surfeited with carbohydrate.
Many of the nostalgic elements of that World War II summer are in Mr. Raucher's novel - the popular songs, the catch‐phrases inspired by radio programs, the fighter plane identification charts that every American boy hung in his bed room, next to the pinups of Claire Trevor, Kay Francis and Jinx Falkenburg. As it was meant to, it certainly takes one back.
Throughout most of the novel, Hermie is a kind of loaded revolver. Eventually, he learns that his goddess is both human and vulnerable, though he learns it under circumstances he would not have preferred. The finale is melancholy; so, usually, is the end of adolescent innocence.
Herman Raucher is a scenarist as well as a novelist: In fact (following the Segal‐Love‐Story routine), he wrote the script for the recently released movie, Summer of '42, before assembling the book of that title. As is the case with Love Story, his novel‐audience may be excused for feeling that his characters are more at home in the camera's eye. However, the book he has extracted from his screenplay is wittily done, in the somewhat roguish style of a mock‐epic - though the epic in Hermie's mind is real enough.
Since it is only at his peril that a writer kids around with the deeply felt, romantic notions of the young, I'm forced to conclude he's aiming at the no‐longer‐young reader. A really young reader would probably feel patronized by his tone. When a boy is playing Beau Geste among the dunes, he doesn't like to be reminded that his jockey shorts are full of sand. LINK TO ORIGINAL ARTICLE
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