Corvette Summer (1978)

(On Cable TV, October 2022) If you want to talk about late-1970s charm, you could do much worse than have a go at Corvette Summer. In some ways, it’s a great “also played into” for two actors—Mark Hamill (obviously typecast for his work in Star Wars) as a high-school mechanic desperately tracking down his stolen refurbished Corvette, and Annie Potts (often best known for her turn in Ghostbusters) as an equally young woman going to Vegas to become a prostitute. Bouncing between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, the film often deals in serious issues (stolen car ring, prostitution, mentor betrayal, deadly threats) but does so in a cheerfully entertaining way. The adventure-type plotting also helps, with a new hopeful development every few minutes as our hero tracks down a rumour bringing him to Vegas, sees his car driving past but can’t catch it, gets a job that allows him to keep an eye on the city streets, tracks down the thief, etc. As a period piece, it has aged well—and remains watchable because it does something that hasn’t really been done all that often since then. The appeal for gearheads is there, obviously, but not limited to them—and there are also plenty of fine character moments. Some sequences are a bit slap-dash (not all car chases are equally well-staged—the final one, in particular, seems more convenient than organic) but we get the gist anyway. Most of all, though, we get a youthful Hamill doing the kind of role he may have done more often had he not been completely typed as Skywalker, and Potts doing so well in her film debut that she ended up being nominated for a Golden Globe for it. Corvette Summer is not a big, a great or an ambitious film—but it delivers what it meant to, and does so in entertaining low-key style.