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| Bruce Davison, Catherine Burns, Barbara Hershey and Richard Thomas in LAST SUMMER. |
I’ve spent the last couple of evenings watching Frank & Eleanor Perry’s LAST SUMMER, based on a novel by Evan Hunter. I’m very torn about the film itself, which I find provocative and dangerous in all the right ways, but also a bit of a short story forced to feature length, and shot in a way that is not much more than straightforward, with lots of close-ups more typical of a TV-movie. The performances are very good, but in a sense, they were written to be very good and I’m not inclined to say that the young actors did anything substantially greater than doing their jobs to the best of their ability. I like Catherine Burns very much in the film but I guess I’m not the target audience who have made a cult of her work here, and the fact that the personally critical response to it caused her to withdraw from screen acting and public life. I find the ending of the film, even in this restored version on the Warner Archive Blu-ray, as rushed and incoherent as it has always been in the choppy prints, and I find Burns’ omission from the shots after the climax less thought-provoking than narratively irresponsible. My feelings on these matters were not changed by listening to the audio commentary, featuring Larry Karaszewski and Perrys biographer Justin Bozung, but I was illuminated on some other points - such as why the film spends so much time on the seagull, and various behind the scenes details. It’s a very good track.
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| Peggy Steffans (credited as Esme Kane) stumbles upon a teenage tryst in DEEP INSIDE. |
While watching the film, I took notice of the fact that it was shot on Fire Island in 1969 and remembered that Joe Sarno’s film DEEP INSIDE was also shot there two summers earlier in 1967. The Sarno film (which incidentally launched the Cannon Films empire) was released in April 1968, around the same time Evan Hunter’s novel came out, so there is no question of either influencing the other, but as I’ve thought more about it, the more I’ve realized how much the two stories have in common. Whereas the book and Perry film separate the adult and teenage characters almost entirely, the Sarno film includes some young adults but focuses primarily on the adults, who seem amused by the teenage misbehavior they remember being part of. You can’t really compare the levels of acting found in the two films, but the big themes of LAST SUMMER were old stand-bys for Sarno by the time he made DEEP INSIDE: teenage rebellion sparked by adult hypocrisy and infidelity, polyamory, and - most importantly - the effect on others of one powerful personality. In the case of LAST SUMMER, this is Barbara Hershey’s precocious sexual tease, a ringleader and provocatrice with an avowed IQ of 157; she has a counterpart in DEEP INSIDE’s Milcy, played by Peggy Steffans. Also like DEEP INSIDE, LAST SUMMER rises slowly to a fierce boil, building to an unforgivable event that destroys or badly compromises friendships. In DEEP INSIDE, Milcy’s plan to avenge an old rivalry backfires badly on her, while LAST SUMMER exacts no such punishment, leaving its climactic crime in the viewer’s lap unresolved.
Ultimately, LAST SUMMER shows mainstream cinema finally catching up with Sarno’s advanced ideas about the role played by psychology, even aberrant psychology, in sexual relationships - just as the introduction of the MPAA ratings system began to force softcore exploitation fare toward the ultimate survival strategy of hardcore. Oddly enough, just as DEEP INSIDE went through a period when it was considered a “lost” film, LAST SUMMER (at least in its most complete form) similarly became impossible to see for a nearly identical length of time, recently resurfacing as a Warner Archive Blu-ray release in July 2026, about two years after a 35mm print of DEEP INSIDE was recovered, restored, and included in Vinegar Syndrome’s 2024 box set THE LOST PICTURE SHOW.
(C) 2026 Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.
