Zinerama SUMMER MOVIES

 

Summertime (“And the livin’ is easy”), In the Summertime, Summer (The First Time), All Summer Long, Summer Breeze, Summer in the City, Summer Nights, Summer Night City, Long Hot Summer. Summer’s Cauldron, Cruel Summer. Bummer in the Summer.  

 

Whether celebrating or lamenting our most eagerly anticipated and beloved season, songs pumped out by record companies this time of year are aimed squarely at teenage hormones. Summer movies are rather more complex.    

 

For one thing, they resist easy categorisation. Blockbusters and new franchise chapters may be released during the school holidays to maximise profits, but sun, sea and sand are almost always irrelevant. Even movies that belong to what might best be characterised as a mini-genre can be divided between first loves and last looks, dreams fired and lost, the upful and the downful.  

 

Mind you, some of the most eminent filmmakers have had it both ways. Éric Rohmer spent most of his career writing and directing understated movies about the seasons but, not unnaturally, favoured the broader dramatic possibilities of summer. Not only did he offer us the full spectrum, he put women centre stage: Claire’s Knee (1970), a stirring story about a soon-to-be-wed man and two teenage girls; the first-love confusion of Pauline At The Beach (1983); the post-breakup angst of The Green Ray (1986).  

 

Having grown up accustomed to the enchanting but all-too brief Swedish summer, Ingmar Bergman deployed it as the setting for some of his early, occasionally funny movies: Summer Interlude (1951), Summer With Monika (1953), Smiles Of A Summer Night (1955), Wild Strawberries (1957). Those familiar with the straitlaced nation President Eisenhower presided over during the first half of the 1950s, igniting the rock ‘n’ roll revolution Marlon Brando’s biker anticipated in The Wild One, will not be surprised to learn that Summer With Monika, in which Harriet Andersson daringly swims naked, was initially banned in the US.  

 

It was finally released there as Monika: The Story of A Bad Girl, and among the first in line to see it was the teenage Woody Allen. So profound was Bergman’s influence on the Brooklyner, Allen would not only make a string of homages (Interiors, September, Another Woman) but remix Smiles Of A Summer Night as A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982).  

 

PERHAPS INEVITABLY, in terms of quality, the downful tend to linger longer. Think, most obviously, of Jaws (1975), which gave us that dreadful word Spielbergian, but also Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), in many sage eyes the definitive noir, and Lawrence Kasdan’s even raunchier update Body Heat (1983), in which Kathleen Turner somehow outdoes Barbara Stanwyck for icy femme fatality.  

 

Think, shudderingly, of Joe Mankiewicz’s Suddenly Last Summer (1959). An all-star feast for scissor-happy censors, this gothic shocker spins giddily around a secretly gay holidaymaker devoured by street urchins on a Spanish island. Co-scripted by a pair of brazenly uncloseted chaps, Tennessee Williams, author of the original play, and Gore Vidal, it was illuminated by one of Elizabeth Taylor’s most convincing performances, as the dead man’s cousin being pushed into a lobotomy. Montgomery Clift lags only slightly behind as the weedy would-be lobotomiser, but the film remains most notable for Katharine Hepburn as the devilish mother who wants to delete her beloved boy’s demise from her niece’s hard drive. Quite why nobody beat Mankiewicz to casting The Great Kate as a villain remains one of cinema’s most glaring mysteries.  

 

And think, above all, of Do The Right Thing (1989), the first - to be followed by Crooklyn (1994), Summer of Sam (1999) and Red Hook Summer (2012) - of a cluster of movies Spike Lee set at the temper-snapping height of a broiling Brooklyn summer. A breakthrough for black film, and the industry’s treatment of racism in general, Lee’s jagged plot swirls around a pizzeria amid temperatures so sweltering that, as in Double Indemnity and Body Heat, you not only see the sweat drip and ooze but smell it. Without that sensuality, the slow-burning intensity of that powder keg atmosphere would have lacked a fuse.  

 

Heat, Lee and Wilder seem to be saying, can drive anyone to the edge of madness. In similar but infinitely more jocular vein is the classic Ealing comedy Passport to Pimlico (1949), wherein a bombed-out pocket of south London declares independence. In the slyly winking final shot, with normal service about to be restored, we see a temperature gauge sliding downwards. Was it all a dream? Who knows. 

 

ALL THE SAME, summer movies that sink the spirits tend not to be the ones we keep on our list of guilty (and not-so guilty) pleasures. More than 70 years on, Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953) shows that humour can be timeless as well as language-proof. The sequel-spawning success of Mamma Mia! The Movie (2008) wasn’t only attributable to an idyllic (if fictional) Greek island and all those ABBA chartbusters but, far more enduringly and endearingly, the sight of Meryl Streep letting her hair down.   

 

Beach movies, progenitor of the feelgood film, emerged in the 1950s, the decade teenagers were invented and rapidly became the most important demographic in Tinseltown. For multi-millions of spotty, virginal Americans, Where The Boys Are, Gidget, Gidget Goes Hawaiian, Beach Party and its myriad follow-ups - Muscle Beach Party, Bikini Beach, Beach Blanket Bingo - were their first glimpses of romance. Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon were their Doris Day and Rock Hudson, Sandra Dee their Marilyn. Small wonder, when Elvis Presley traded in rock ‘n’ roll rabble-rousing for Hollywood humdrummery, that Colonel Tom Parker kept him shuttling between surfing opportunities in Hawaii and Acapulco.  

 

Across the Atlantic, where sunshine was appreciably harder to come by, Summer Holiday (1963) was my introduction to the genre as well as to true-ish romance. For a suburban Londoner with but one date on his cv, nothing seemed jollier than four dolly bird-hungry lads hiring a double-decker bus for a trip to Greece and finding a quartet of like-minded lasses. Not even the top-billing presence of Cliff Richard, now well past his sell-by date as the British Elvis and too antiseptic for even my soppy pre-teen tastes, could stop multiple viewings at the Odeon. That year also yielded Summer Magic, starring Hayley Mills, John’s daughter, who was blonder, sweeter and marginally more age-appropriate than Ms Monroe, thus earning her the unique privilege of being my first screen crush. 

 

Closest in spirit to those Gidget movies remains Randal Kleiser’s hit-gushing take on the stage smash Grease (1978), and not just because Frankie Avalon pops up. It’s 1958: cocky rocker John Travolta and prim Aussie Olivia Newton-John are canoodling on the beach, neither remotely resembling a teenager, never mind a match made in heaven. They never expect to see each other again, but wouldn’t you know it, wind up at the same school. Nearly half a century on, seeing Sandy don black leather and high heels to re-snare Danny might raise hackles, but you’d have to have a PhD in misery not to get a kick out of You’re The One That I Want, Greased Lightnin’ and Hopelessly Devoted To You, never mind Stockard Channing’s gritty proto-feminist Rizzo.   

 

Nevertheless, the summer movie that tingles this spine most is George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973), an ode to passing youth set, tellingly, after the sun goes down. Released with the nifty tagline “Where Were You in ’62?”, this jukebox of a coming-of-ager centres on Lucas’s faceless Californian hometown, the aptly named Modesto, and enlivened by a cast of unknowns including Candy Clark, Richard Dreyfuss, Ron Howard and casting director Fred Roos’ former carpenter, Harrison Ford. Most empathetic of all was Charlie Martin Smith as Terry the lovable wimp.  

 

Lucas’s affectionate depiction of the highs and lows of their last night as high schoolers didn’t simply sire a hugely popular TV spin-off (Happy Days). The ker-ching sounds were unprecedented for a movie costing under $1m: in all, American Graffiti made $140m at the box office on a budget of $600,000 that Universal only upped by $175,000 after Francis Coppola, Lucas’s loyal buddy and advocate, threatened to buy the rights himself and came aboard as producer. Those vast profits made the director bankable and Star Wars possible.  

 

What made the clock-proof American Graffiti possible? As with all imperishable cinematic experiences, everything. The non-stop conveyor belt of hits, from the opening Rock Around The Clock to Why Do Fools Fall In Love? Mels Diner with its roller-skating waitresses and other-worldly neon glow. The reimagining of that fatal car race in Rebel Without A Cause. The mysterious older blonde cruising in a virginal white T-Bird who mouths “I love you” at Dreyfuss but might be a prostitute. Legendary DJ Wolfman Jack offering Dreyfuss a lollipop. 

   

    

NOT THAT THE most durable summer romances focus exclusively on teenage lust and longing. In Mike Nichols’ The Graduate (1967), dithering Dustin Hoffman (Benjamin) zig-zags between Katherine Ross (Elaine) and her alcoholic mother, the absolutely fantabulous Anne “Mrs Robinson” Bancroft, who was actually younger than Hoffman. The wordless final scene alone is worth shelving reservations for: Benjamin and Elaine united in the back of a bus, joy melting into uncertainty and fear.  

 

As you might expect, David Lean’s Summertime (1955) is a feast for the eyes, a postcard from Venice that also pays homage to The Great Kate, who plays a lonely, dowdy middle-ager shaken up by a genteel grey-haired antique dealer. No less alluring and holiday brochure-ish is William Wyler’s Roman Holiday (1953), in which the other holy Hepburn, Audrey, flirts savvily with Gregory Peck’s smart-aleck reporter, who hasn’t the foggiest idea she’s a princess. Woody Allen gives us the leafy wonders of the French Riviera in the neglected Magic In The Moonlight (2014), in which Emma Stone dazzles in her first substantial role and Colin Firth scales such vicious heights of sarcasm it makes you wonder how he had the chutzpah to join the Woody Cancellers.   

 

Still, if you fancy a mature(ish) European affair with more depth and power, however subtle, the pick of the bunch has a Viennese flavour. Hitherto famed, celluloid-wise, for a brace of pitch-black classics, Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949) and Nic Roeg’s Bad Timing (1980), Wilder’s hometown does the visual serenading in Before Sunrise (1995), the opening chapter of Richard Linklater’s “Before Trilogy”, which is the closest the big screen has ever got to a rom-com franchise but so much more than that.  

 

Its rise from cult to Valentine’s Day staple suggests yours truly is very far from alone in having flown wildly off the romantic track in a train carriage. That’s where student Celine (Julie Delpy), a feisty Parisian political and environmental activist, meets Jesse (Ethan Hawke), an American hipster with literary aspirations who persuades her to leave the train with him. What ensues is a gabfest for the ages as they absorb the faded grandeur of Vienna, searching for ways to connect.  

 

The moment we’ve been waiting for is a transparent tribute to the best-known scene in The Third Man, but with a twist. The Prater Wheel is the venue for both, but while Holly and Harry have their moral duel, Celine and Jesse kiss. Even that scene, though, is trumped by the one where they squeeze into one of those sadly extinct record shop listening booths: taking turns to steal undetected glances, their eyes dance like Fonteyn and Nureyev. We’ve all been there. As in Boyhood, Linklater’s pursuit of his holy grail, that quest for universality, never falters. 

 

Yet even Lucas and Linklater’s masterpieces cannot quite reach the parts of me that are habitually refreshed whenever I revisit Love and Mercy (2014), Bill Pohlad’s bittersweetly unorthodox biopic of Brian Wilson, the troubled genius behind the Beach Boys, the band that gave us the sound of sunshine. Good Vibrations, Surfin’ USA, California Girls and Fun, Fun, Fun are as synonymous with summer as shorts and long days, hence the release of a new documentary, The Beach Boys, and the title of 1974 compilation album Endless Summer. Pohlad’s eyes, however, are firmly on Wilson’s gut-wrenching descent from prodigy to casualty. 

 

Though a mighty long way from his chatty comfort zone, John Cusack is terrific as the drugged-up Brian, beguiled by sleazy doctor Eugene Landy (a flesh-creeping Paul Giamatti) and revived by Melinda (Elizabeth Banks), the future second wife he meets in a touchingly hilarious scene at a car showroom.  

 

More affecting still is a chubby-faced Paul Dano as the half-deaf but idealistic Brian who survived his father’s jealous abuse to pen that most celestial of love songs, God Only Knows. Going toe-to-toe with Daniel Day-Lewis in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007) was some feat but Dano digs even deeper here, vividly capturing Brian’s gentleness and vibrant thirst for musical adventure before he took one trip too many and retired to bed for three years. That Dano’s Golden Globe was for best supporting actor merely reaffirmed that individual awards for such a collective enterprise are about as meaningful as election promises. 

 

You don’t have to appreciate Wilson’s impact to be moved by Love And Mercy – his meisterwerk Pet Sounds tops many a Greatest Album Ever poll and roused the awed Beatles to make Sgt Pepper – or be aware of his lost decades. But if you don’t crumble when the title song pipes up and the credits roll, your heart probably bears more than a passing resemblance to a deserted beach.