The Summer of '42 is a film about memory and memories are often different than what actually happened and in the film it is purposely not clear what did, in fact, happen. Herman Raucher's story is supposedly based on his own experience but who knows if that is true or accurate. 16-year-old Hermie (Gary Grimes) has sex with twenty-something Dorothy (Jennifer O'Neill) after her husband dies in the war, but perhaps this is only a fantasy. There is some humor about losing one's virginity, buying a rubber, caressing a girl's arm in the movies thinking it's her breast, etc. Hermie and his friends roam an island during the summer; their parents never appear and the teen-agers appear to have complete freedom to basically horse around. Robert Surtees's glossy cinematography and Michel Legrand's romantic music add to the adolescent fantasy of the plot.
Mulligan plays down the period stuff in the film (there aren't many cars on the island) and the fumbling teen-agers could be from any period, at least any period before the rise of social media, as Hermie goes to buy his first rubber at a local pharmacy, futilely trying to distract the pharmacist by purchasing a strawberry ice cream cone. Yes, it's a coming-of-age story, directed with the same sensitive feeling director Robert Mulligan has shown for children and teen-agers from his first film, Fear Strikes Out (1957) to his last, The Man in the Moon (1991).
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