Portal:Film/Selected article/52

Summer of '42 is a 1971 American "coming-of-age" motion picture drama based on the memoirs of screenwriter Herman Raucher. It tells the story of him as a boy in his early teens on his 1942 summer vacation at Nantucket Island off the coast of New England, where he embarked on a one-sided romance with a woman, Dorothy, whose husband had gone off to fight in World War II. Their ill-fated relationship culminates and promptly ends after a drunken depressed Dorothy makes love with him while grieving over the death of her husband. The film was directed by Robert Mulligan, and starred Gary Grimes as Hermie, Jerry Houser as his best friend Oscy, Oliver Conant as their nerdy young friend Benjie, Jennifer O'Neill as Hermie's mysterious love interest, and Katherine Allentuck and Christopher Norris as a pair of girls whom Hermie and Oscy attempt to seduce. Raucher's novelization of his screenplay was released prior to the film's release and became a bestseller. Though a pop culture phenomenon in the first half of the 1970s, the novelization went out of print and slipped into obscurity throughout the next two decades until a Broadway adaptation in 2001 brought it back into the public light and prompted Barnes & Noble to acquire the publishing rights to the book. The next year, the film received a digitally remastered DVD release from Warner Bros.; today, the book remains in-print, although new copies can only be obtained by special order through Barnes & Noble.