Summer of '42 (1971)
Directed by Robert Mulligan
Over the summer of 1942 on Nantucket Island, three friends -- Hermie, Oscy and Benjie -- are more concerned with getting laid than anything else. Hermie falls in love with the married Dorothy, whose husband is an army pilot recently sent to the battlefront of World War II.
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What critics compared Summer of '42 to
Unfortunately, instead of hearing the theme from Summer of '42 , we then flash back to 1958, when the teenage Michael (played by the gawky, endearing David Kross) had a furtive love affair with the much older Hanna Schmitz (Winslet), a ticket-taker on the Berlin trolley.
A flawed mix of a kind of German "Summer of '42" with a theatrically bound courtroom drama and aftermath, "The Reader's" lopsided before-and-after structure defeats part of its dramatic impact.
All of this is cloaked in a "Summer of '42" coming-of-age story about a boy's first love and an older woman's last brush with tenderness.
There is a bittersweet element to this, but "Summer of '42" it ain't.
Malena may first strike viewers as an Italian variation of Summer of '42, a coming-of-age story of a boy who becomes infatuated with an older, unreachable town beauty.
I'm sorry, but even though filmmaker Giuseppe ("Cinema Paradiso") Tornatore's name is on "Malena," a wannabe sensitive coming-of-age tale set in World War II-era Sicily, it still feels more like "Porky's" with marinara sauce than "Summer of '42."
The plot could be called a gay Summer of '42 in its wistful pairing of a twentysomething and a teenager, but director Luca Guadagnino and screenwriter James Ivory apply a soulful sophistication to the complexities of first love, even more troubling as "the love that dare not speak its name."
I mean, it’s not “Summer of ’42” or “The Reader,” but we’re no longer venerating this “lover of experience” initiation ritual, or are we?
In most respects, Minnie’s coming-of-age tale is conventional…for a male protagonist (stretching back to the gauzier nostalgia of a Summer of ’42); it’s high time to explore the flip side.
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Other film dramas have dealt with the coming of age story, where a young man is introduced to love via an older woman—Summer of '42, for example—or any number of foreign films that introduce young men to adult lust, including the director's cut of Cinema Paradiso, Fellini's Amarcord , and Truffaut's Antoine Doniel series.
There's really only one flaw in "Don Jon" and that's Esther's persistence in engaging Don - it doesn't make sense, he recoiling from her surface emotions, her very otherness, even though the relationship's payoff in Don's sexual redemption works (rooted possibly in another 70's film, "Summer of '42").
Recalling “American Graffiti” by way of “Dazed and Confused” with just a whiff of “Summer of ’42,” it is a coming-of-age flick which deftly underscores the pleasures and pains associated with infatuated young love.
If you liked last year’s twee hipster "Moonrise Kingdom," the classic "Summer of '42," or the nostalgic "Super 8," this comedy fits the genre neatly and provides an antidote to the screaming mega-blockbusters to be found in the bigger theaters at the multiplex.