Summer of '42
Summer of '42 is a
1971 American "
coming-of-age"
motion picture drama based on the memoirs of screenwriter
Herman Raucher. It tells the story of him as a boy in his early teens on his 1942 summer vacation at
Nantucket Island on the coast of
New England, where he embarked on an ill-fated, one-sided romance with a woman whose husband had gone off to fight in
World War II. The film was directed by
Robert Mulligan, and starred
Gary Grimes as Herman Raucher,
Jerry Houser as his best friend Oscar "Oscy" Seltzer,
Oliver Conant as Raucher and Seltzer's nerdy young friend Benjie,
Jennifer O'Neill as Raucher's mysterious love interest, and Katherine Allentuck and Christopher Norris as a pair of girls whom Seltzer and Raucher attempt to seduce.
Robert Mulligan also has an uncredited role as the voice of an unseen adult Herman Raucher.
Raucher's adaptation of the novel was released prior to the film's release, and became a runaway bestseller, to the point that audiences (and even the studio itself) lost sight of the fact that the book was based on the movie and not vice-versa. Though a pop-culture phenomenon in the first half of the
1970s, the novelization went out of print and slipped into obscurity throughout the next two decades until a
Broadway adaptation in 2001 brought it back into the public light and prompted
Barnes and Noble to acquire the publishing rights to the book. The next year, the film received a digitally remastered DVD release from Warner Brothers; today, the book remains in-print, although new copies can only be obtained by special order through Barnes and Noble.
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An adult Herman Raucher (the unseen Robert Mulligan) recalls moments of his youth |
The film opens with a series of grainy, color-warped stills appearing over melancholy piano music, representing the abstract memories of the unseen Herman Raucher (Robert Mulligan), a middle-aged Brooklyn-Jewish man. After the stills finish, we find Raucher in the present day (1968 according to the book), looking out on the
Nantucket sea, recalling the Summer he spent on the island in 1942. The film flashes back twenty-six years, to a day that Raucher (now called "Hermie"; Gary Grimes) and his friends Oscar "Oscy" Seltzer (Jerry Hauser) and Benjie (Oliver Conant) spent running and playing on the beach. In the middle of their horsing around, 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, when they were twelve, touched a girl's breasts. While Oscy is more interested in sex with gorgeous girls, though, 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 that 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 movie house and picking up a trio of girls; Oscy happens to find three high-school girls, and sets about staking out Miriam, the most attractive one, for himself, "giving" Hermie her wallflower friend, Aggie, and leaving Benjie with the third girl, an out-of-shape, bespectacled girl with
braces. Frightened by the reality of the concept of sex, Benjie runs away into the night, and isn't seen by Hermie or Oscy again the whole summer. The third girl, thinking that her appearance repulsed Benjie, likewise walks away. Hermie and Oscy spend the entirety of the show 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 trying to play 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 that Oscy points out to Hermie the reason for Aggie's passivity was that Hermie was fondling her elbow, not her breast.
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Hermie (Gary Grimes) arrives to help the mystery woman (Jennifer O'Neill) move boxes |
The next day, in preparation for a marshmallow roast with Aggie and Miriam, Hermie goes to the local druggist, and in a protracted sequence attempts to build up the nerve to ask the pharmacist for condoms. He eventually does so, after purchasing some ice cream, telling the pharmacist that the condoms are for his "brother" and that he thinks that they are, in fact, a type of water balloon. Later, Hermie helps the young bride move boxes into her attic, and when he turns down her offer of monetary compensation, she thanks him for his honesty and friendship and gives him a kiss on the forehead.
That night, during a marshmallow roast, Hermie finds himself unable to "put the moves" on Aggie, although Oscy is successful in having sex with Miriam in between some sand dunes; he is so successful, in fact, that he eventually sneaks over to where Hermie and Aggie are roasting marshmallows and asks Hermie to give him some condoms, having run out of his own. Confused as to what's happening, Aggie follows Oscy back between the dunes, where she sees him having sex with Miriam and runs home crying. Hermie, too, sees the act, although he is more mesmerized than anything.
The next day, Hermie comes across the young bride sitting outside her house, writing a letter to her husband. Hermie offers to come keep her company that night and she says she looks forward to seeing him, finally revealing that her name is Dorothy. An elated Hermie goes home and puts on a suit, saddle shoes, and a dress shirt, and heads back to Dorothy's house, running into Oscy on the way; Oscy informs Hermie that Miriam's appendix burst that morning and she's been rushed to the mainland. Hermie, now convinced that he is at the brink of adulthood because of his relationship with Dorothy, brushes Oscy off and the two get into a fight. Oscy threatens to tell everyone on the island that Hermie is a homosexual, and storms off; Hermie heads over to Dorothy's house, which he finds eerily quiet. Sneaking in, he discovers an empty bottle of whiskey, several cigarette butts, and a telegram from the U.S. Government, with a time stamp of just an hour prior, saying that Dorothy's husband has been killed in France. A drunken Dorothy staggers out of her bedroom, crying, and Hermie comforts her. Dorothy moves to the record player and turns on an album (the movie's theme music) and invites Hermie to dance with her. Near the end of the song, Dorothy kisses Hermie and the two embrace, slowly moving to the bedroom, where they have sex. Afterwards, Dorothy and Hermie, each suitably shocked and dejected, find themselves unable to speak to one another; Dorothy puts on her bathrobe and retires to the porch to smoke and cry while Hermie dresses alone in her bedroom. He approaches her on the porch, where she can only say "Goodnight" to him. Hermie leaves, his last image of Dorothy being that of her leaning against the railing, crying as she stares off into the night sky.
Hermie spends the entire night roaming the island in a state of shock. At dawn he meets Oscy on the beach and the two share a silent moment of reconciliation, broken only by Oscy's informing Hermie that Miriam survived her appendix bursting but will remain hospitalized until Autumn. Sensing that something traumatic has occurred between Hermie and Dorothy, Oscy, in an uncharacteristic act of sensitivity, lets Hermie be by himself, departing with the words, "Sometimes life is just one big pain in the ass."
Hermie goes back to Dorothy's house to try and sort out what has happened; he finds it abandoned, Dorothy having fled the island in the night. All that remains is an envelope tacked to her front door with Hermie's name on it. Hermie opens it; inside is a note from Dorothy, saying that she hopes he understands that she must go back home to arrange her husband's funeral and deal with familial obligations. She assures Hermie that she will never forget him, and that she hopes one day he will come to terms with what happened that night. Her note closes with a prayer that Hermie will be spared the kind of tragedy which has entered her life.
Back in 1968, the adult Herman Raucher stands once more on the beach, looking at Dorothy's old house and the ocean and remembering the day that he, Oscy, and Benjie first saw her, and sadly recounts that in the ensuing twenty-six years he has never learned what became of Dorothy.
The movie (and subsequent novel) were
memoirs written by Herman Raucher; they detailed the events in his life over the course of the summer he spent on
Nantucket Island in 1942 when he was fourteen years old. Originally, the film was meant to be a tribute to his friend Oscar "Oscy" Seltzer, an Army medic killed in the
Korean War. Seltzer was shot to death on a battlefield in Korea while attending to a wounded man; this happened on Raucher's birthday, and consequently, Raucher has not celebrated a birthday since. During the course of writing the screenplay, Raucher came to the realization that despite growing up with Oscy and having bonded with him through their formative years, the two had never really had any meaningful conversations or gotten to know one another on a more personal level.
Instead, Raucher decided to focus on the first great impacting experience of his life, his falling in love for the first time. The woman (named Dorothy, like her screen counterpart) was a fellow vacationer on the island whom Raucher had befriended one day when he helped her carry groceries home; he became a friend of her and her husband and helped her with chores after her husband was called to fight in
World War II. Raucher lost his virginity to her one night when he came to visit her, arriving only minutes after she received notification of her husband's death. The next morning, Raucher discovered that she had left the island, leaving behind a note for him (which is read at the end of the film and reproduced in the book). He never saw her again; his last "encounter" with her came after the film's release in 1971, when she was one of over a dozen women who wrote letters to Raucher claiming to be "his" Dorothy. Raucher recognized the "real" Dorothy's handwriting, and she confirmed her identity by making references to certain events only she could have known about. She told Raucher that she had lived for years with the guilt that she had potentially traumatized him and ruined his life. She told Raucher that she was glad he turned out all right, and that they had best not re-visit the past.
In a 2002 interview, Raucher lamented never hearing from her again and expressed his hope that she was still alive. Raucher's novelization of the screenplay, with the dedication, "To those I love, past and present," serves more as the tribute to Seltzer that he had intended the movie to be, with the focus of the book being more on the two boys' relationship than Raucher's relationship with Dorothy. Consequently, the book also mentions Seltzer's death, which is omitted from the film adaptation.
Herman Raucher wrote the film script in the
1950s during his tenure as a television writer, but "couldn't give it away." In the
1960s, he met Robert Mulligan, who had just finished directing
To Kill a Mockingbird. Raucher showed Mulligan the script, and Mulligan took it to Warner Brothers, knowing that the studio was looking for a follow up to "Mockingbird." Mulligan told Warner Brothers that the film could be shot for the relatively low price of a million dollars, and Warner Brothers approved making the picture. They had so little faith in the movie becoming a box-office success, though, that they shied from paying Raucher outright for the script, instead promising him ten percent of the gross.
When casting for the role of Dorothy, Warner Brothers declined to audition any actresses younger than the age of thirty; Jennifer O'Neall's agent, who had developed a fondness for the script, convinced Warner Brothers to audition his client, who was only twenty-two at the time. O'Neall auditioned for the role, albeit hesitantly, not wanting to perform any nude scenes; O'Neall ended up getting the role and Robert Mulligan agreed to find a way to make the film work without blatant nudity.
Though the film took place on Nantucket, by the
1970s the island was too far modernized to be convincingly transformed to resemble a
1940s resort, so production was taken out to the West Coast of the United States. Shooting took place over eight weeks, during which Jennifer O'Neall was sequestered from the three boys cast as "The Terrible Trio," in order to ensure that they didn't become close and ruin the sense of awkwardness and distance that their characters felt towards Dorothy. Production ran smoothly, finishing on schedule.
After production, Warner Brothers, still wary about the film only being a minor success, asked Raucher to adapt his script into a book. Raucher wrote it in three weeks, and Warner Brothers released it prior to the film to build interest in the story. The book quickly became a national bestseller, so that when trailers premiered in theatres, the film was billed as being "based on the national bestseller," despite the movie having been completed first. Ultimately, the book became one of the best selling novels of the first half of the 1970s, requiring 23 re-prints between 1971 and 1974 to keep up with customer demand.
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The soundtrack to Summer of '42 |
The film's soundtrack consists almost entirely of compositions by
Michel Legrand, many of which are variants upon
The Summer Knows, the movie's theme. In addition to Legrand's scoring, the film also features the song
Hold Tight by
The Andrews Sisters and the theme from
Now Voyager. Due to this lack of songs, when the soundtrack was released, it contained not only the score to
Summer, but also a compilation of several of Legrand's other original scores. In spite of these songs' inclusion, many issues of the album are still labeled as exclusively being the soundtrack to
Summer, while others contain the notation in small print on the album cover "Also contains The Picasso Suite."
The film became a blockbuster upon its release, grossing twenty-five million dollars. making it the fourth highest grossing film of 1971 and one of the most successful movies in history, with an expense to profit ratio of 1:25. According to Herman Raucher, his ten-percent of the gross (it is estimated that
video rentals and purchases in the United States since the
1980s have produced an additional $20.5 million dollars) , in addition to royalties from book sales, has "paid bills ever since." In addition to being a commercial success, the film also received rave critical reviews; it counted among its fans
Stanley Kubrick, who in a rare moment of pop-culture infusion into his films, had the movie play on a television in a scene in
The Shining.
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A Tony Bennett recording of "The Summer Knows" |
Summer of '42 went on to be nominated for over a dozen awards, including the
Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture - Drama, the
Golden Globe Award for Best Director, and the
Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay. Ultimately, the film only won two awards, the
Academy Award for Original Music Score and the
BAFTA Anthony Asquith Award for Film Music, both of which went to Michel Legrand. Legrand's song,
The Summer Knows, has since become a
pop standard, being recorded by such artists as
Frank Sinatra,
Andy Williams, and
Barbra Streisand .
In
1973, the film was followed up with a sequel,
Class of '44, a
slice-of-life movie made up of vignettes about Herman Raucher and Oscar Selzter's experiences in college prior to fighting in the
Korean War. The only crew member left from
Summer of '42 was Raucher himself, with a new director and composer being brought in to replace Mulligan and Legrand. Of the principal four cast members of
Summer of '42, only Jerry Houser and Gary Grimes returned for prominent roles. Oliver Contant did appear in the film, albeit for less than five total minutes of screen time. Jennifer O'Neall did not appear in the film at all, nor was the character of Dorothy mentioned. The film met with poor critical reviews and was altogether a box office failure.
The 1973 song
Summer (The First Time) by
Bobby Goldsboro has almost exactly the same subject and apparent setting, although there is no direct credited link.
Bryan Adams has however credited the film as being a partial inspiration for his
1985 hit
Summer of '69.
In the ensuing years since the film's release, Warner Brothers has attempted to buy back Herman Raucher's ten-percent of the film as well as his rights to the story so that it could be remade; Raucher has consistently declined. The
1988 film
Stealing Home shares numerous similarities not only to
Summer of 42 but also
Class of '44, with several incidents (most notably a subplot dealing with the premature death of the protagonist's father and the protagonist's response to it) appearing to have been directly lifted from Raucher's own life. Rumors have persisted on the
Internet Movie Database user commentaries and messageboards that
Stealing Home is an attempted "covert remake" of
Summer of '42.
In
2001, Raucher consented to the film being made into a
Broadway musical play. The play met with positive critical and fan response, and was in fact endorsed by Raucher himself, but the play was forced to close down in the aftermath of the
9/11 Terrorist Attacks. Nevertheless, the play was enough to spark interest in the movie and book with a new generation, prompting Warner Brothers to re-issue the book (which had since gone out of print, along with all of Raucher's other works) for sale with
Barnes and Noble's online bookstore, and to restore the film and release it on DVD.
In
2002, Jennifer O'Neall claimed to have obtained the rights to make a sequel to
Summer of '42, based on a short story she wrote, which took place in an alternate reality in which Herman Raucher had a son and divorced his wife, went back to Nantucket in
1962 with a still-living Oscar Seltzer, and encountered Dorothy again and married her. As of
2006, this project--which O'Neall had hoped to produce with
Lifetime television, has not been realized, and it is unknown whether O'Neall is still attempting to get it produced, or if Raucher ever consented to its production.
# Raucher, Herman. Summer of '42. 23rd Edition. New York: Dell, 1974. #
Korean War Memorial - Oscar Seltzer# [
1]# [
2]# [
3]# "All Movie Guide." [
4]# Internet Movie Database Business Data [
5]# Interview with Herman Raucher. [
6]# The Mike Douglas Show, Interview with Herman Raucher. Original date of broadcast unknown.#
Interview with Jenifer O'Neall#
Summer of '42 Plus Twenty#
Summer of '69 lyrics explained by co-author
