Last Summer

I first saw this strange, profoundly haunting character drama back in 1988 or 1989. I was either 19 or 20 years old and the movie was playing in the middle of the night on a Portland UHF TV station that never went off the air.

At that point, I didn’t know who director Frank Perry or his then-wife, co-collaborator and screenwriter Eleanor Perry, was. I may have seen parts of DAVID AND LISA, Perry’s earlier celebrated film, before on TV. Regardless, I had no idea what I was getting into.

LAST SUMMER was released in 1969 and deals with a trio of beautiful, vivacious teens—played by Richard Thomas, Barbara Hershey, Bruce Davison—mostly hanging out on the beach and deepening their friendship in various ways. Although the pacing of the narrative is languid, matching the endless ebb and flow of the ocean waves, there’s an increasingly unnerving tension to the proceedings. Much of that is sexual. But when a new character, played by the unforgettable Catherine Burns (who was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her performance), intrudes on the idyllic mood, a cruelty invades. A shadowing grows darker as we near the end of the story.

Burns is physically opposite of the three glimmering young people. She’s more conservative, awkward, scolding. She exudes bad vibes, at least for the others. And where Eleanor’s script (based on the novel by Evan Hunter) nails human nature, I think, is in showing the thorny cruelties that bleed out in group behavior. The strong—the beautiful,…