LAST SUMMER on BLU-RAY from Warner Archive

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A Lost American Classic Finally Comes Home

Review by John Larkin

George Feltenstein, who oversees the Warner Archive Collection, has affectionately described this release as “The Larry Karaszewski Special Edition,” and it is difficult to imagine a more appropriate name. We owe a sincere thank you to Larry Karaszewski. Best known as the acclaimed screenwriter who, with his longtime writing partner Scott Alexander, wrote ED WOOD, THE PEOPLE VS. LARRY FLYNT, MAN ON THE MOON, BIG EYES, and DOLEMITE IS MY NAME, Karaszewski has also become one of the great public champions of neglected cinema.

Karaszewski first encountered LAST SUMMER when he was young, and like certain films that lodge themselves in our minds before we are even able to articulate their power, it never left him. There is something inspiring about a film lover becoming a filmmaker and then using his position to rescue one of the movies that helped form him. Sometimes it takes that kind of personal attachment, coupled with persistence and an unwillingness to accept that a great work has simply disappeared, to return a film to its rightful place.

In the case of Frank Perry’s LAST SUMMER, Karaszewski did what true film lovers are supposed to do. He refused to let an important film vanish. For years, this was the movie he kept talking about, recommending, pushing, and insisting deserved to be seen again in its original theatrical form. Now, thanks in large part to that advocacy, LAST SUMMER has finally been resurrected, restored, and given the kind of home video release that once seemed unlikely.

For decades, LAST SUMMER existed less like an available film than a rumor passed between cinephiles. It had been released on VHS, but never on DVD or Blu-ray, and for many viewers it was accessible only through compromised versions, rough prints, or its considerable reputation. That long absence gave the film a strange mythology, but it also denied the work the serious consideration it deserved. This Warner Archive Blu-ray changes that. It does not merely put a difficult to see title back into circulation. It restores a vital, disturbing, beautifully acted American film to the conversation.

Directed by Frank Perry from a screenplay by Eleanor Perry, based on the novel by Evan Hunter, LAST SUMMER begins with the deceptive ease of a sun drenched coming of age film. On Fire Island, three teenagers drift through the season together: Peter, played by Richard Thomas; Dan, played by Bruce Davison; and Sandy, played by Barbara Hershey. They are bored, attractive, privileged, restless, and still young enough to treat consequences as an abstraction. Their days are filled with beach air, flirtation, games, sexual curiosity, casual cruelty, and the hazy aimlessness of adolescence.

The trio’s seemingly carefree dynamic begins to change when they meet Rhoda, played by Catherine Burns in an extraordinary Oscar nominated performance. Rhoda is not like the others. She is awkward, lonely, self conscious, and deeply hungry for connection. She wants to belong to this trio, but from the beginning there is something dangerous about the way they absorb her into their world. They do not simply welcome her. They study her, test her, and gradually discover how much she will endure in exchange for acceptance.

The film understands, with almost painful clarity, how teenage groups can create their own private moral universe. The rules are unspoken. The alliances shift without warning. Power belongs to whoever is most capable of withholding affection or redirecting humiliation toward someone else. Cruelty begins as teasing, becomes entertainment, and then progresses into something far more horrifying.

What makes LAST SUMMER so powerful is that Frank and Eleanor Perry never reduce it to a simple morality play. The film is not interested in underlining its points or providing comforting explanations. It watches. It observes how desire, insecurity, boredom, entitlement, and group pressure can gradually strip people of their empathy. It understands cruelty not merely as an individual defect, but as a social process. One person tests a boundary. Another laughs. A third remains silent. Before long, everyone has participated.

The Fire Island setting is essential to the film’s spell. The light, the water, the heat, and the openness of the landscape make its emotional rot feel even more unsettling. This is not a dark film because it looks dark. It is dark because it shows ugliness blooming in broad daylight. There is seemingly nowhere for anything to hide, yet the characters become increasingly capable of hiding from themselves.

Barbara Hershey’s Sandy is central to that dynamic. Hershey does not play her as a conventional villain or temptress. Sandy is charismatic, playful, elusive, and frighteningly instinctive. She seems to understand the effect she has on the boys before they understand it themselves, and she recognizes the power available to her without ever needing to announce that she possesses it. Hershey makes Sandy magnetic without simplifying her, allowing us to see both the excitement she generates and the danger that follows her.

Bruce Davison and Richard Thomas are equally strong as young men caught between sensitivity, desire, cowardice, competitiveness, and the need to perform for each other. Davison finds the volatility beneath Dan’s outward confidence, while Thomas brings a vulnerability to Peter that makes his failures feel particularly tragic. Peter appears capable of decency. At times, he appears to understand exactly what is happening around him. That only makes his inability to act upon that awareness more painful.

But the performance that haunts the film, and ultimately becomes its indelible quality, is Catherine Burns as Rhoda. Her work here is devastating because it never feels like a performance in the conventional sense. She does not present Rhoda’s pain to us. She seems to experience it in front of us. Every uneasy smile, pause, swallowed word, and attempt to maintain her dignity reveals another layer of a person trying to survive the humiliation of being seen as someone who does not belong.

Burns’ monologue is one of the most emotionally naked scenes in late 1960s American cinema, and perhaps one of the greatest pieces of acting ever put on film. The brilliance is not only in Burns’ delivery, but also in the way Perry allows the scene to unfold. The camera does not rescue us from her vulnerability or break the moment apart in search of easier emotional cues. It remains attentive to her. Burns is given the time and space to let Rhoda’s memories emerge through minute changes in her face and voice. The scene becomes almost unbearably intimate because nothing stands between the audience and the person speaking.

Burns gives Rhoda a trembling intelligence, wounded dignity, and unmistakable humanity. She never begs the audience for pity. Instead, she allows us to recognize the terrible universality of Rhoda’s desire to be known, wanted, and accepted. In lesser hands, Rhoda might have remained a symbolic outsider, existing only to expose the cruelty of the other characters. Burns makes her the film’s emotional center.

It remains a genuine shame that Burns did not continue in film in the way this performance suggested she might. After seeing LAST SUMMER, one expects to be watching the beginning of a major screen career. Instead, her acting career became brief and elusive, ultimately defined as much by absence as by the astonishing work she left behind.

That absence hangs over the film now, especially in the material surrounding its restoration. At the American Cinematheque’s Aero Theatre screening in Santa Monica, where the restored theatrical version premiered with Barbara Hershey and Bruce Davison in attendance, Davison became visibly emotional while discussing Burns and the sadness that she did not continue acting. That moment tells you something. This was not merely another catalog title getting cleaned up and placed on a shelf. For the people connected to it, LAST SUMMER clearly still carries enormous emotional weight.

The film feels at once completely of 1969 and unnervingly timeless. It belongs to that moment when American cinema was testing new boundaries and discovering what filmmakers could finally place on the screen, yet it does not feel dated in the ways one might expect. Its frankness is still startling and Its understanding of cruelty has lost none of its sharpness.

There is even a passage involving computer dating that contains what a contemporary viewer would immediately recognize as a form of catfishing. It was one of the most surprising details in the film for me. The technology and terminology belong to another era, but the deception is instantly familiar. This is not merely an amusing case of a 1969 film predicting internet culture. It reveals that the impulses behind our current technology existed long before the platforms themselves. The tools have changed. The desire to construct a false identity, manipulate a stranger, and turn someone else’s vulnerability into entertainment has not.

That is one reason the film should connect so strongly with a new generation. This is ultimately a story about the terror of wanting to be accepted, and the even greater terror of what people may do once they are accepted by the wrong group. The dynamics Perry examines now play out publicly and continuously through social media, but the underlying need is the same. LAST SUMMER understands how quickly belonging can become complicity.

As a Blu-ray release, this represents Warner Archive working at its best. The new 1080p presentation was created from 4K scans of the original camera negative and preservation elements, restoring the film’s texture, atmosphere, and essential sense of place. Fire Island again feels tangible rather than distant, with the physical beauty of the setting making the story’s mounting ugliness even more disquieting. The original mono soundtrack is also preserved in lossless form, an appropriate choice for a film whose power depends so heavily upon dialogue, silence, and atmosphere.

Just as importantly, the supplemental material frames LAST SUMMER as a film worth discussing, not merely rediscovering. Karaszewski’s feature length commentary with film historian Justin Bozung, the TRAILERS FROM HELL segment, a deleted scene with Richard Thomas and Ralph Waite, the Allied Artists promotional reel, and the original theatrical trailer all help construct a fuller picture of the film’s history and legacy.

The disc also preserves the restoration’s public reemergence. The Santa Monica discussion with Hershey, Davison, and Karaszewski is included, as is the New York discussion from the Paris Theater with Richard Thomas and Karaszewski.

There is a personal irony there. I was in Los Angeles when the New York screening occurred, and I would have loved to attend it, especially because Richard Thomas has always been a favorite of mine. Thankfully, this Blu-ray means that those conversations are no longer locked away inside a pair of rare theatrical events. The film, and the experience of seeing its actors finally able to discuss it in its restored form, is included here.

The release also feels unusually personal for Warner Archive. Karaszewski’s beautifully written and heartfelt liner notes tell the story of his relationship with the film, beginning with the impression it made upon him when he was young and continuing through his efforts to bring it back into public view. They are not perfunctory production notes. They are the testimony of someone explaining why a film mattered to him and why he needed other people to have the opportunity to experience it.

These are the first liner notes I can recall seeing included with a Warner Archive title. The slipcover also appears to be a first for the label, or at the very least the first I have personally encountered. Those physical touches may seem modest compared with the elaborate packaging offered by boutique labels, but within the history of Warner Archive they make this release feel genuinely exceptional. The presentation reflects the spirit behind the restoration. This is not simply a product being returned to the marketplace. It is a cause that finally reached completion.

LAST SUMMER is not light summer viewing. It is not an exercise in nostalgia, and it is certainly not a beach movie in any comforting sense. Yet it is, in its own strange and haunting way, a perfect film to watch during the summer because it understands the season as both paradise and sweltering inferno. Summer becomes a pressure chamber, primed to draw out desire, resentment, appetite, and people’s most primal impulses.

The sunlight is beautiful. The days are long. Freedom feels intoxicating. Then, almost imperceptibly, the air changes.

I am genuinely astounded that a film this indelible has not remained a continuous part of the pantheon of late 1960s and early 1970s American cinema alongside EASY RIDER, MIDNIGHT COWBOY, FIVE EASY PIECES, and THE LAST PICTURE SHOW. LAST SUMMER possesses that same revolutionary shock, the feeling of American movies discovering that they no longer needed to look away from the ugliest truths about the country or the people living within it. Though released in 1969, it feels like the starting gun for the world-changing decade of American cinema that followed.

It also introduced a remarkable group of young actors. Hershey, Davison, and Thomas went on to build substantial and enduring careers. Catherine Burns took a very different path, yet her work here is not a historical footnote beside theirs. It is the film’s wounded heart. Once you have seen her as Rhoda, it is difficult to understand how either the performance or the film containing it could have been allowed to recede from view for so long.

For anyone who cares about American cinema, this Blu-ray is essential. It rescues a film that should never have been permitted to vanish, restores Catherine Burns’ great performance to its rightful place, and gives Frank and Eleanor Perry’s disturbing, unforgettable work the serious home video treatment it has deserved for decades.

At the center of this resurrection remains Larry Karaszewski, who saw LAST SUMMER when he was young, never forgot what it did to him, and spent years trying to ensure that other people could experience it. In his liner notes, he expresses his hope that viewers will discover the film and then pass it along to others. That is how neglected films return to life. One person remembers. One person insists. Eventually, an audience forms around that belief.

A new generation can now encounter LAST SUMMER without relying upon a damaged copy, a faded memory, or the testimony of someone fortunate enough to have seen it decades ago. They can experience it as a living film, one whose insights into loneliness, conformity, deception, and cruelty remain painfully current.

LAST SUMMER is finally available to own, and this release is truly special. It is an act of preservation, an act of advocacy, and proof of what persistent love for a film can accomplish.

Thank you, Larry Karaszewski, for refusing to let LAST SUMMER remain lost.