On Coming Of Age In World War II-Torn America- Summer Of 1942 (1971)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

Summer of 1942, Jennifer O’Neil, Gary Grimes, 1971

 

I suppose each generation goes through its coming of age period somewhat differently, coming of age meaning in beginning the treacherous process of understanding all the sexual changes and commotions once you pass puberty somewhat differently. Take the one I know about personally of coming of age in the early 1960s in the age of the “Pill,” of technology-driven space exploration and of some new as yet unspoken and undiscovered social breeze coming to shake up a lot of the old values, to turn the world upside down, from our parents’ generation. Take too the one before mine, the one represented in this film under review Summer of 1942 about the coming of age in our parents’ generation. The generation that on one edge, the older edge went through the whole trauma of the Great Depression that brought barren days to the land and of slogging World War II and at the other edge, the younger edge, missing the trauma of war and its particular stamp on those who survived went on to form the alienated youth who turned “beat,” rode homespun hot rods to perdition, grabbed a La Jolla perfect wave surf board, revved up hellish motorcycles to scare all the squares and come under the immediate spell of jailbreak rock and roll. Here is the funny thing at least on the basis of a viewing of this film on the question of dealing with sex, sexual knowledge and experiences there was a very familiar (and funny) sense that our parents who, at least in my case and the case of my growing up friends, went through the same hoops-with about the same sense of forlorn misunderstanding.               

Here’s how it played out in this film which was originally released in 1971 although the at least the two generations after mine might also recognize some of the danger signs, pitfalls and funny stuff that went on in this film around sexually coming of age in this wicked old world. The story line is based on the essentially true-to-life experiences of a Hollywood screen-writer Hermie Raucher (played by Gary Grimes), coming of age 15, and his two companions, gregarious Oscy and studious Benji, who were slumming in the year 1942 at the beautiful but desolate end of an island retreat in the first summer of the American direct involvement in the Pacific and European wars after the Japanese bombings of Pearl Harbor. (The island Nantucket Island in the book but filmed off desolate Mendocino in California in the film). They like a million other virginal boys of that age during war or peacetime were driven each in their own way by the notion of sexual experimentation and conquest and so the chase was on.      

That chase was on at two levels. The rather pedestrian one of seeking out young girls of their own age to see what shook out of the sexual tree and Hermie’s almost mystical search for “meaningful” love in the person of an older woman, Dorothy, played by Jennifer O’Neil, who had been a young war bride staying on the island after her husband headed off to war. The own age part, funny in parts, driven mostly by pal Oscy’s overweening desire to “get laid” with a blonde temptress whom he finally got his wish with on night at the secluded end of the beach with his most experienced partner. On that occasion Hermie was shut out of any desire he had to do the same with her friend who was as bewildered by sex as he was. The “older woman” (in our circles a “cradle-robbing” older woman although she was only 22) notion of love is what drove him the moment he has set eyes on her when the trio was spaying on her and her husband so he was “saving” himself for her. And after a series innocent (and some goofy) encounters with Dorothy one night, after she has just found out that her husband had been killed in the war, she bedded him (there is no other honest way to put the matter). That was that though, for when Hermie subsequently went back to the cottage she had left the island and left him a more solemn young man.              

Those are the main lines that get played out but what makes this one more than of ordinary interest to me was the whole lead-up, the whole “foreplay” if you will to be doing something about getting out of that dreaded virgin status (and avoid the designation “homo,” among heterosexual youth the bane of every corner boy guy coming up in that and the next generation). There was the very familiar inevitable (and frustrating)“feeling up” of the girl scene at the movies of which neighborhood legends are made (although Hermie missed the mark, literally, on that one), the awkward scene where Hermie was helping Dorothy with storing some packages and he got sexually excited by her off-hand helping hand touch, the scene where the three friends “discover” what sexual intercourse is all about through the good graces of Benji’s mother’s medical books (unlike most of the rest of us learned what we learned about sex in the streets, and not always correct information either), and of course the fumbling by the numbers (off-screen) when Oscy has his first sexual experience. The best scene of all though and it really showed the difference between then and now when the younger generations can grab condoms off the shelf at any drugstore or in some places right in schoolhouse restrooms (formerly “lav’s”) and who might not quite appreciate enough the scene where Hermie tried to buy “rubbers” at the local village drugstore from the jaded disbelieving druggist. Yeah, watch this one and remember your own, either sex, torturous rumbling around coming to terms with sex.