Summer of '42 (1971) on Netflix
Summer 1942 on a New England island: fifteen-year-old Hermie and his friends Oscy and Benjie have girls on their minds. Hermie is drawn to Dorothy, a war bride whose husband is overseas.
- Netflix3.5/5
- IMDb7.2/1010,193 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes78%
Trailer
Plot summary
Hermie is fifteen in the summer of 1942, when he and his family join his two best friends, Oscy and Benjie, on a New England island. The boys spend their afternoons on the beach, and sex is on all their minds, though none of them is sure what it involves. Oscy is the boldest of the three, Benjie the shyest, and Hermie the sensitive one. Then Hermie notices Dorothy, a young bride whose husband, an army pilot, has just been sent overseas. He helps her carry groceries home, and she accepts the offer, beginning a friendship in which she sees him as a polite young man who can help with chores around the house. Hermie wants to spend as much time with her as he can.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Summer of '42 (1971)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The film was originally meant as a tribute to a friend of Herman Raucher's, an Army medic killed in the Korean War, who was shot dead while tending to a wounded man; it happened on Raucher's birthday, and he has not celebrated a birthday since.
- Years after the film's release, the real Dorothy came forward on an episode of The Mike Douglas Show; Raucher recognized her handwriting among more than a dozen women's letters and she confirmed her identity with details only she could know.
SPOILER
Raucher confirmed in a 2002 interview that, contrary to popular belief about the real event the film dramatizes, he and the real "Dorothy" never actually had intercourse that night, saying it was mostly holding, though the film lets audiences think otherwise.- Warner Bros. declined to audition any actress younger than 30 for the role of Dorothy, until Jennifer O'Neill's agent, who had developed a fondness for the script, convinced the studio to see his client, who was only 22; she auditioned hesitantly, not wanting to perform nude scenes.
- Warner Bros. had so little faith in the film becoming a box-office success that they shied from paying Herman Raucher outright for the script, instead promising him ten percent of the gross.
- Filmmakers Stanley Kubrick and Quentin Tarantino both cited the film as a favorite; Kubrick had Wendy Torrance watching it on television in The Shining, and Tarantino called it 'one of the best movies of the '70s.'
