Summer of ’42 (1971)

(On Cable TV, April 2021) The subgenre in which Summer of ’42 takes place is a tricky one — the adult memoir, looking back upon a teenage coming-of-age episode. It can be universal and specific at once, relatable or dull depending on your own perspective. At times, Summer of ’42 feels like a prototype — an early example of something the baby boomer generation would later crank out by the dozens in the 1980s about the late-1960s, early-1970s period when they had their own awakening. Familiarity does dull the senses in this case — no matter how groundbreaking this sexually charged film could have been in 1971 (it was a substantial box-office and critical hit), it feels creaky and repetitive fifty years later. These are no longer the early days of New Hollywood, where franker depictions of suggestive material were changing the nature of cinema. In the 1980s alone, the “lads wanting to lose their virginity” subplot would become an entire genre, while more mature recollections of boyhood would impress in works such as Stand by Me. There’s also the aspect of a young man lusting after an older woman — try gender-flipping the roles and I’m not sure that the film would be so acclaimed these days (although 2009’s An Education comes to mind as a counter-example — I’m guessing that execution matters a lot). None of this makes Summer of ’42 a bad film. But it does make it a bit over-familiar, especially the condom-buying sequence that seems to have been copied everywhere in later years. While director Robert Mulligan one got there first, there have been many, many movies like it since. Although I suppose that the 1940s setting remains more original than a 1960s one.