Hernie wants to know all about life and love and war and sex. Especially sex. He and his two buddies spend their summer discussing the future, peering into forbidden books, trying to pick up girls. Hermies is 15 and has a head full of dreams, schemes and terrible yearnings for a certain older woman of 22H
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Cast in the form of Hermie’s memoir, Summer of ’42 is a warm evocation of youth in a generation on the threhold of change. Robert Surtees’ haunting pastel photography, interwoven with Michel Legrand’s Academy Award-winning bittersweet musical score suggests the tone of times past and captures the complex feelings that underlie memory itself. Perfection of detail in everything from clothes to house interiors awakens the ’40s strongly that we not only see but also touch another era.
"We were different then," Hermie says, remembering Bette Davis movies and triple-scoop ice cream cones. Yet director Robert Mulligan ( To Kill Mockingbird) also manages to impart a timeless quality to Hermie’s summer. What happens to Hermie happens to all of us, sooner or later.
Three highly talented teenage actors (Gary Grimes as Hermie, Jerry Houser and Oliver Conant as his friends) convey both the hilarity of their awkward sexual quest and the genuine pain of growing up. When Hermie is finally united with his elusive "older woman"(exquisitely portrayed by Jennifer O’Neill) in one of the most sensitive love scenes on film, we understand everything he has learned and felt on his path from innocence to experience.
Summer of ’42 is set in a gentler, less complicated America. It is about youth, about sexual awakening, about how it is before the first time. Most of all, it is about remembering. "For everything you take, you leave something behind," Hermie says . Summer of ’42 tells us about our own memories, about what we have gained and what we have gained and what we have lost.
The movie is rated R, and is 104 minutes long.
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