Summer of ’42

During his summer vacation on Nantucket Island in 1942, a youth eagerly awaiting his first sexual encounter finds himself developing a contradictorily innocent love for a young woman awaiting news on her soldier husband’s fate in WWII.

• Director: Robert Mulligan
• Genre:Drama
• Runtime:104 minutes

Cast

Jennifer O’Neill: Dorothy
Gary Grimes :. Hermie
Jerry Houser : Oscy
Oliver Conant : Benjie
Katherine Allentuck: Aggie

The film opens with a series of grainy, color-warped still photographs appearing over melancholy piano music, representing the abstract memories of the unseen Herman Raucher (Robert Mulligan narrating in voiceover), a middle-aged man from Brooklyn. After the stills finish, we hear Raucher speaking in the present day (1971 according to the book), recalling the summer he spent on the island (fictionalized in the novel as “Packett Island”) in 1942. The film flashes back to a day that then 15-year-old “Hermie” (Gary Grimes) and his friends – jock Oscy (Jerry Houser) and introverted nerd Benjie (Oliver Conant) – spent running and playing on the beach. In the middle of their goofing off, the three boys spot a newlywed young soldier carrying his bride (Jennifer O’Neill) into a house on the beach. The boys are all struck by her beauty, especially Hermie, who finds himself unable to get her out of his mind.

The next several days on the island find the boys continuing to spend their afternoons on the beach, where, in the midst of young, scantily-clad teenage girls, their thoughts invariably turn to sex; all of them are virgins, the height of their experience being when Oscy and Hermie touched a girl’s breasts when they were twelve. While Oscy is more interested in sex with gorgeous girls, however, Hermie finds himself developing genuine romantic interest in the young bride, whose husband he spots leaving the island on a military transport boat one morning. Later that day, Hermie spots her trying to carry numerous bags of groceries by herself, and helps her get them back to her house. The two strike up a friendship and he agrees to return in the future to help her out with chores.

Meanwhile, Benjie mentions that one of the books kept in the beach house his parents are renting is a sex manual. Oscy and Hermie convince the reluctant Benjie to steal the book; upon reading it, Oscy and Hermie become convinced they now know everything necessary to lose their virginity and become great lovers. They decide to put this hypothesis to the test by going to the island film house and picking up a trio of girls; Oscy happens to find three high-school girls, and sets about staking out the most attractive one, Miriam (Christopher Norris), for himself, “giving” Hermie her wallflower friend, Aggie (Katherine Allentuck) and leaving Benjie with Gloria, a heavyset girl with braces. Frightened by the reality of the concept of sex, Benjie runs away into the night, and is not seen by Hermie or Oscy again the whole summer. Gloria, thinking that her appearance repulsed Benjie, likewise walks away. Hermie and Oscy spend the entirety of the film (Now, Voyager – an anachronism, as that film wasn’t released until October 1942) attempting to “score” with Miriam and Aggie, Oscy aggressively pursuing Miriam to the point that she strikes him, although Oscy soon learns that she is the island “hussy” and simply playing hard to get. Hermie, meanwhile, finds himself getting unexpected success with Aggie, who allows him to grope her breast for almost twelve minutes; it isn’t until after the show Oscy points out to Hermie the reason for Aggie’s passivity was that Hermie was in fact fondling her elbow. Read more