There’s a thin line between innocence and cruelty. J.M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, revealed that the secret of his hero’s eternal youth is heartlessness.
Peter has the same feelings as the rest of us, he just doesn’t hold on to them for very long.
He’s sad when one of his Lost Boys is killed, but if any of them start to grow up he “thins them out”—a phrase that Barrie doesn’t explain and probably shouldn’t.
There’s a similar stain of cruelty on Frank Perry’s Last Summer, and as with Peter Pan it’s disguised as a celebration of innocence.
Adapted by Perry’s wife Eleanor from the novel by Evan Hunter (Hitchcock’s screenwriter for The Birds), Last Summer rode a late-sixties wave of “now” films that dared to explore teenage sexuality.
Like The Graduate, Perry’s film was lauded for its frank portrayal of kids who, having been shamelessly used by the older generation, are now indulging in some shamelessness of their own.
Unlike Mike Nichols’s classic, Last Summer quickly faded into obscurity after all its 35mm prints were lost. It would take another thirty years for a 16mm version to surface, and now that it’s being immortalized on disc it may finally win back some of the attention it deserves.
It’s a remarkable film, as timeless in its own way as The Graduate. But don’t look for any poignant humor or Simon and Garfunkel ballads. Beneath its tender glow, Last Summer is a vacation from hell.
Set in the wealthy summer enclave of Fire Island, it begins as a story of girl meets boy… and boy.
When we first encounter Sandy (Barbara Hershey), a nubile teenybopper straight out of Seventeen magazine, she’s begging two oversexed rich boys to help her rescue a wounded seagull. Peter (a pre-Waltons Richard Thomas) and Dan (Bruce Davison, making his screen debut), are only too happy to help as long as they can keep stealing glances down her bikini top.
Watching Sandy nurse the seagull back to health lures us into seeing her as a kind and caring person, even vulnerable under the gaze of two boys on the make. She comes off as anything but controlling, which is probably why she’s so good at it.
But even after the bird recovers, she still won’t let it fly away. She even makes a harness for it. Peter and Dan should probably notice that.
Even as she playfully stokes the boys’ hormones (she lets them tease her about taking her top off and finally does it), Sandy skillfully channels their lust into a three-way friendship. She won’t let them go any further and she won’t let them get away.
As she does with the seagull, Sandy feeds the boys just enough to let them feel like they’re still running wild. She lets them ply her with beer, cherishing the fantasy that they’re corrupting her and not the other way round.
She calls the Heineken “truth serum” and decides that each of them has to reveal a dark secret with every swig. When it’s her turn, she lightly notes that her father got “funny” with her once when she was little, putting his hand up her skirt—then laughs it off in a way that’s disturbing if she made it up and even more if she didn’t.
She never speaks of it again, but it does help to explain why she’s so insistent on stage-managing the desire of two horny boys: it feels good to take control. She’ll go topless for Peter but says she won’t “let him” go any further—then lets both Peter and Dan slide their hands under her blouse during a Swedish art film.
If you’re thinking this is not going to end well for Sandy, think again. She’s not the victim here. Neither are her two Lost Boys.
It’s while she’s trying to teach her seagull to fly again—the boys play out the string like a kite—that the trio is interrupted by Rhoda, a younger teen in a chaste bathing suit who refuses to call what they’re doing “teaching” or “fun.” The bird is clearly frightened, she says. Either they let it go or she’ll call the ASPCA.
Rhoda is played by Catherine Burns, whose talent is so rare (she earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress) that it’s impossible to believe she simply walked away from acting a few years after Last Summer.
Although she’s meant to seem awkward and out of place—she’s a girl from Ohio among these rich New Yorkers—Rhoda is confident when she speaks from a place of caring. As the writer of a column on interesting people for her school newspaper, she’s also the only one who seems to have any kind of interior life.
Rhoda’s talent is for knowing what people will grow up to be. Dan, she’s decided, is headed straight for admissions chair of the local country club. Peter’s future is “unmapped,” and she likes that about him. If she has any predictions about Sandy, she keeps them to herself.
We think she’s going to be the movie’s conscience. Unfortunately, as with so many teens, she is betrayed by her need to be liked. This is when our island adventure stops being A Summer Place and starts drifting into that other beach movie, Lord of the Flies. Just like Piggy, Rhoda pays a huge price for seeing things too clearly. In fact, the only thing she can’t see is how horrible her new friends are.
All of this is handled subtly at first. Rhoda keeps showing up uninvited, and you’d expect Sandy to shoo her away. Instead, Sandy does what only the best queen bees do well: she offers Rhoda a way to feel attractive and included.
One night, Rhoda interrupts Sandy, Peter, and Dan while they’re washing each other’s hair. Rhoda idly mentions that her own hair is full of beach sand. Sandy catches her drift but doesn’t respond. It’s only after Rhoda agrees to tell her darkest story—a long, perfectly underplayed monologue about her mother’s death by drowning—that Sandy offers to wash Rhoda’s hair.
Rhoda naturally has a fear of the water, and it’s while teaching her to swim that the future John Boy Walton shows his tender side. Sandy buys her a bikini. Rhoda is so taken by all of this that she nearly forgets to ask what happened to that seagull.
Sandy says it flew away. Spoiler: Sandy bashed the seagull’s head in with a rock. Because it bit her and nobody gets to do that. The boys know this and have made their peace with it. Rhoda doesn’t have a clue.
There is a Greek-tragic inevitability to the movie’s final act. Sandy sets Rhoda up on a computer date with a nice Puerto Rican gentleman named Anibal, whom they insist on calling “Annabelle” because that’s funny. They also think it’s funny to get him drunk and let some local tough kids beat the shit out of him.
This should be Rhoda’s cue to find some new friends, but she doesn’t. It’s not that she’s attracted to their heartlessness. She knows who she’s dealing with. But they’re offering the closest thing to warmth she’s ever known.
I normally try not to read other people’s reviews of a film while I’m writing my own, but I was curious to learn how Last Summer was seen on its initial release. What I read completely floored me. Even Gone with the Wind’s reputation hasn’t changed as much as Last Summer’s.
It seems that critics—even some of the greats of their time—took Last Summer for what it was pretending to be, an innocent exploration of forbidden pleasures. Like Peter, Dan, and Rhoda, they fell under Sandy’s spell.
Roger Ebert—Roger Ebert—called Last Summer “one of the finest, truest, most deeply felt movies in my experience.” He also refers to Catherine Burns as “plump.” She’s not, but I guess movie reviewers felt more comfortable talking that way about young people’s bodies back in the swinging sixties. The New York Times critic called Rhoda “a desperate spinster.” Her character is fifteen.
The contemporary reviews helped me understand just how good the Perrys were at lulling the audience into the false paradise they’d created, with devastating effect once they finally tear the curtain away.
Charming sociopaths are always more attractive on film than they deserve. No matter how potently we’re reminded that Valmont, Scarlett O’Hara, Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan, or The Talented Mr. Ripley’s Dickie Greenleaf are basically awful people, we can’t help but be seduced. It’s that combination of youth and money.
We look at Sandy and see who we want to be, or who we want to fuck. We look at Rhoda and see who we are. And we see who gets fucked.
By which I mean, literally raped.
It’s Sandy’s Sistine Chapel. She’s spent the whole movie getting the boys horny, she’s devoted half the film to sexualizing Rhoda, and—stroke of genius—she actually tells Rhoda to get lost, knowing that Rhoda will insist on tagging along to the forest where Sandy will offer the girl up to the boys as a substitute for her own body. Maybe she planned it all, maybe it was a whim. But it’s where that road was always going to end. Rhoda judged her. Nobody judges Sandy.
Nice-guy Peter actually holds Rhoda down while Dan forces himself into her.
Revealing an ending is something else I try not to do, but if you don’t know where Sandy is leading us—what she has in fact been setting up all along—then nothing about the movie will make sense. Even after Sandy leaves no doubt about her cruel streak, it’s still just barely possible to think, okay, we all did stupid things at the beach during high school. That Puerto Rican guy? Ah, he was a drunk pervert. Killing the bird? Well, it did bite her.
The dark side of teen lust goes back as far as 1931’s Mädchen in Uniform and came to full toxic bloom in Larry Clark’s and Harmony Korine’s Kids. Last Summer sits both chronologically and narratively midway between these films—less suggestive and Freudian than the earlier film, far subtler than the later one—and sets a deadlier trap than either one. It sure seems to have fooled Roger Ebert.
But then, that’s all teen sex movies to some degree. The familiar gotta-lose-our-virginity-before-September trope has been used to pass off some seriously shitty behavior as youthful hijinks. National Lampoon’s Animal House played sex with an underage girl for laughs. Sixteen Candles helped a stuck-up rich girl loosen up by letting her get assaulted while she was too drunk to give consent.
So we’ve let Sandy and the boys off the hook up until they finally do something that can’t be laughed off. That is exactly where the movie ends.
Roger Ebert thought the final rape scene unnecessary, called it “sensational” and said it didn’t strike him as “particularly valid.” It is unfortunately all too valid. Otherwise we might be tempted to think what he did: that Last Summer is being truthful and fearless when it’s actually allowing us to be entertained by monsters.
That’s the genius of this movie. And like many prescient films, it was soon to be overtaken by real life. Two months after the film’s 1969 release, the Tate-LaBianca murders showed us all what teenagers from well-off families were really capable of.
Unlike Katharine Ross, Ali MacGraw, and most of the Breck-girl beauties of late 60s movies, Barbara Hershey went on to have a serious career. She also proved capable of the empathy that her character lacked: she went into mourning when one of the movie’s trained seagulls was killed.
Richard Thomas went on to 70s stardom in The Waltons before enjoying a late-career renaissance in The Americans. Bruce Davison has spent an entire career playing just the kind of entitled country-club executives that Dan was predicted to be. Catherine Burns rejected fame just as it seemed ready to embrace her but enjoyed some success as a children’s author.
And Frank Perry? He would not direct another movie like Last Summer. His last big project was Mommie Dearest, about a sociopath with a lot less finesse than Sandy. He directed the entirely forgettable Hello Again—the movie that Shelley Long left Cheers to make—and then vanished without a ripple.
There are movies you try to like but can’t, and there are the ones you want to hate but love anyway. Last Summer is about things you don’t want to see but can’t look away from. It shares this territory with Terence Malick’s blandly malevolent Badlands and the far more charming Bonnie and Clyde. The allure of the rule-breaker, the freedom of the heartless psychopath, is cinema’s most potent poison.
I would say that Last Summer is a very rare story. But I have a terrible feeling that it’s a story that happens for real on a lot of beaches every summer.
In addition to a flawless restoration, extras include commentary, a deleted scene, two Q & A sessions hosted by Larry Karaszewski, vintage promo reel, Trailers From Hell with commentary by Karaszewski, and trailer.
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