Summer of '42 (1971)

Summer of '42 is a 1971 American coming-of-age comedy-drama film based on the memoirs of screenwriter Herman Raucher. It tells the story of how Raucher, in his early teens on his 1942 summer vacation on Nantucket Island, off the coast of Cape Cod, embarked on a one-sided romance with a woman, Dorothy, whose husband had gone off to fight in World War II.

The film was directed by Robert Mulligan, and starred Gary Grimes as Hermie, Jerry Houser as his best friend Oscy, Oliver Conant as their nerdy young friend Benjie, Jennifer O'Neill as Hermie's mysterious love interest, and Katherine Allentuck and Christopher Norris as a pair of girls whom Hermie and Oscy attempt to seduce. Mulligan also has an uncredited role as the voice of the adult Hermie. Maureen Stapleton (Allentuck's real-life mother) also appears in a small, uncredited voice role (calling after Hermie as he leaves the house in an early scene, and after he enters his room in a later scene).

Raucher's novelization of his screenplay of the same name was released prior to the film's release and became a runaway bestseller, to the point that audiences lost sight of the fact that the book was based on the film 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 & Noble to acquire the publishing rights to the book.

Synopsis

The film opens with a series of still photographs appearing over melancholic music, representing the abstract memories of the unseen Herman Raucher, now a middle-aged man. We then hear Raucher recalling the summer he spent on the island in 1942. The film flashes back to a day that then 15-year-old "Hermie" and his friends – jock Oscy and introverted nerd Benjie – spent playing on the beach. They spot a young soldier carrying his new bride into a house on the beach and are struck by her beauty, especially Hermie, who is unable to get her out of his mind.

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