Summer of ’42 (1971)

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Gary Grimes stars as Hermie, a sensitive teenager spending his summer on Nantucket Island, idling away the hours reading comic books, watching movies, and wandering the beaches with his friends. But when he meets a kind, twenty-something newlywed named Dorothy (Jennifer O’Neill) who’s waiting for her husband to return from the battlefront, he becomes infatuated with her. While his friend Oscy (Jerry Houser) obsesses about sex and persuades Hermie to make out with girls their own age, Hermie can’t get Dorothy out of his mind. He goes out of his way to help her with odd jobs around her oceanside cabin. When a letter arrives from the U.S. military one evening, the events that transpire will change Hermie’s life forever.

Summer of ’42 is one of the most palpably heartfelt and viscerally transportive films I’ve ever seen. When you watch the film, you are Hermie and you are on Nantucket Island. You feel everything — the quiet restlessness of summer vacation, the stirrings of first love, and the nostalgia for simpler times. Director Robert Mulligan (To Kill a Mockingbird) takes us there and holds us there, right through to the film’s slow, hypnotic climax and its heartbreaking ending. The loss of innocence has been captured on film many times, but no other attempt measures up to this one.

The film isn’t all angst and drama, though. It has a healthy amount of humor mixed in as well. Hermie and Oscy’s attempt to buy condoms from a weary pharmacist is a highly memorable sequence. The awkwardness of male adolescence is captured throughout the film — in the boys’ learning about sex from a parent’s medical text book, to missing the ‘mark’ when trying to feel up girls in a darkened movie theater.

The ever-present sound of ocean waves intermingles with Michel Legrand’s Oscar-winning piano work to pull you into this film — into Hermie’s mind and heart, into summer on Nantucket Island, and all the way back to 1942. It’s a beautiful, sincere, very moving film that haunts me in all the sweetest possible ways.

(PS: Quentin Tarantino has said, “”I think Summer of ’42 is actually one of the best movies of the ’70s and one of the most devastating endings of any movie I’ve ever seen.”)

Academy Award: Best Music, Dramatic Score (Michel Legrand)

Oscar Nominations: Best Screenplay (Herman Raucher), Best Cinematography (Robert Surtees), Best Film Editing (Folmar Blangsted)