Heavy petting on the home front. Coming-of-age tale has a 15-year-old boy vacationing with his family on Nantucket Island during wartime, becoming smitten with a solder's wife living by herself in a house on the beach. The youngster offers to carry the attractive woman's groceries, and later lugs her boxes up into the attic, but what he really wants to do is master the twelve steps of coupling. Screenwriter Herman Raucher based his story on his own experiences as a sexually-curious juvenile, and received an Academy Award nomination for his work--rather surprising since the film (though popular at the box-office, for a variety of reasons) isn't very good. The dialogue throughout is stilted and unremarkable, and the scenario so underpopulated and bland that the sniggering charm of a vacuous boy hoping to ingratiate himself to an older woman is really all the picture has to offer. The Oscar-winning music by Michel Legrand gives the movie a touch of bittersweet nostalgia, but Robert Surtees' zoom-happy cinematography and Robert Mulligan's plodding direction just about kills any genuine interest in the characters. Newcomer Gary Grimes is over-directed; he's impossibly scrubbed-clean and galumphing one minute, and smiling like a naughty child the next. We first see Jennifer O'Neill romping with her husband in slow-motion, however the rest of her performance also feels a little slow. We never get to know this gorgeous lady; she's as overly-polite and blank as her junior-suitor. The finale is excruciatingly tasteful, dithering and dumb. There was no other place for the story to go but to the bedroom, but one can't help but thinking this was a bad idea. Audiences in 1971 surely hooted at the earnestness to which Grimes is initiated into manhood. Mulligan apparently wants us to feel a kinship with the boy, while the woman disappears into the sea-air like an evaporating question-mark. ** from ****
Review of Summer of '42
