Summer of '42 (1971) versus My Dinner with Andre (1981)

The movie Summer of '42 was just kind of repulsive. Homely teens on vacation in Nantucket do nothing but talk about sex. It shows the advantage kid actors have over adults. Before this, the star, Gary Grimes who played the screenwriter Herman Raucher as a 14-year-old, appeared in one episode of Gunsmoke, one episode of My Three Sons and one episode of The Brady Bunch. Only his character in Gunsmoke had a name. And with that minimal experience, he starred in a major motion picture. 

I first read the Mad Magazine version and later saw the movie on network television. I came across it on streaming video and clicked on it for some reason.

The kids in the movie used diminutive forms of names that didn't have diminutive forms. Oscar was called "Oscy" and Herman was "Hermie".

According to Wikipedia, Oscy and Hermie in real life had been friends since childhood. They went to college together and, if I understood it correctly, were both in the Korean War. Oscy was killed on Hermie's birthday and Hermie never celebrated it again.

Raucher began writing the script as a tribute to his late friend. But he quickly realized he knew nothing really personal about him and that the two of them had never had a meaningful conversation. So the script became autobiographical, about his relationship with a young woman whose husband, by the end of the movie, had been killed in the war.

It could be that Herman and Oscar just didn't have much to talk about. They may not have had any strong feelings about their families or World War Two, being drafted or anything they studied in college.

 

I didn't really have much reaction to Summer of '42, but the Wikipedia entry for it made me contemplate the depth of my own conversations. When I was young, my friends and I talked a lot about ideology. I don't know how much personal information I have on any of them.

It made me think more about it than My Dinner with Andre did. Wallace Shawn and theater director Andre Gregory sit in an expensive New York restaurant. Andre talks and talks and talks about his semi-mystical experiences traveling the world. It's part Razor's Edge, part Auntie Mame. I didn't know if he was a serious mystic or an annoying eccentric. I liked it, but it made me feel better about not traveling the world or getting to eat and talk with wealthy, sophisticated New Yorkers.