The movie "Last Summer" (1969) Thoughts, questions? (Spoilers)

Cafe Society
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I recently saw the movie Last Summer, which I’m assuming is rather obscure. It’s a “coming-of-age” teen movie with a twist - a very horrific twist, and some other very bizarre moments. Among other things it’s notable for featuring Barbara Hershey and a very young Bruce Davison (now better known for his role as Senator Kelly in X-Men and various other sleazy bureaucrats.) Three teenagers, two boys and a girl, from rich New York families are on summer vacation on Fire Island, and begin a non-sexual and yet clearly lustful relationship with each other, with both boys strongly attracted to the girl and possibly to each other but never consummating their feelings. Their fun is spoiled when a frumpy and annoying, yet innocent, girl comes into the scene and one of the boys falls for her, destroying their little circle, and the tension comes to a head with the sickening, perverse ending.

The movie is a weird mix of the theatrical, under-edited and classic-cinema style of early-60s films with the disturbing, somewhat surreal, and tense styles of the late 60s and 70s. The acting is ridiculously awkward and seems terrible at times, and then a moment later it will come off as brilliant. The story goes off in all sorts of weird directions (it was adapted from a book and I think it probably lost something in translation.)

Questions:

First of all, all those scenes with the seagull - are they using a REAL bird? When they pry its mouth open, WIDE open, and reveal its bloody throat, is that a real bird? The eye is moving and it looks mighty real to me. When it is bashed to death later, did they bash a real seagull for that scene?

When they’re in the bar on the mainland with that weird Spanish guy - what is the song on the jukebox? Dan (Bruce Davison) says it’s “the new song by The Band,” but it’s definitely not The Band. It sounds kind of like Canned Heat or something. Wikipedia lists the music as: Aunt Mary’s Transcendental Slip and Lurch Band (rock band), Cyrus Faryar (voice), Buddy Bruno (voice), Ray Draper (tuba, voice), Electric Meatball (rock band), Henry Diltz (banjo, voice), Bad Kharma Dan and the Bicycle Brothers (motorcycle gang). Not sure what the hell “motorcycle gang” is supposed to mean. As far as I can tell this movie has no official soundtrack. But I really liked the rock songs in it. I wish I could find them.

Why did they turn on Rhoda with such ferocity, seemingly out of the blue? The girl Sandy (Hershey) was clearly a manipulative sociopath but both of the boys seemed like fundamentally nice, sweet guys. Why did they so suddenly and viciously rape Rhoda?

Has anyone read the book? How is it different from the film?

Has anyone else even SEEN this movie?

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Sometimes a movie has various songs in the theatrical release, but not in a video release because they didn’t get licensing. So maybe it really was a song by The Band originally.

Where did you see the movie? I’d love to check it out, but Netflix doesn’t carry it.

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I read the book, and saw the movie, but it was a lo-o-ong time ago. Like, the early '80s.

IIRC, the movie stuck pretty close to the book, plotwise. The movie seemed more pretentious, but I think that was mostly the way it was filmed. The book is pretty spare and didn’t – so far as I can remember – offer any more in-depth exploration of the characters than the movie did.

No idea whether the seagull in the movie was real. It certainly looked real. Nor do I have any intel about the music other than to say it did have a soundtrack. A friend of high school mine owned the record, although I don’t remember ever listening to it. I always noticed it in her collection, because I had seen the movie – this was before I read the book.

Evan Hunter wrote the book. Hunter is the pseudonym for Ed McBain. He also wrote (as Evan Hunter) a fairly interesting treatment of the Lizze Borden story, called Lizzie. And there was a sequel to Last Summer (called Come Winter). I read it, at the same time I read Last Summer, and was disappointed in it. It featured Sandy & the 2 boys again, but not much about Rhonda. One of the boys (the ‘sensitive’ one, played by John-boy in the movie) was in psychoanaysis and that seemed to just go on and on.

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Dude, the suspense is killing me. How about a spoiler?

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Well - I did a search for some of the lyrics after carefully discerning them while watching the movie, and found one single page (here) with the full soundtrack listing and some details about it. Interestingly enough it turns out it was all original music recorded specifically for the movie by John Simon, the producer of The Band, and members of The Band play on several of the songs. Danko, Helm and Manuel are featured on four of the songs and Garth Hudson on one of them. Unsurprisingly the soundtrack to this movie is extraordinarily rare, not available on iTunes, and with only a few copies (Vinyl LPs) on eBay ranging from 35 to 100 dollars for the mint LP. But I do plan to order it.

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Re-read the first post:

As for the seagull question, Wikipedia reports:

Although that sounds absurd, it’s true. I remembering reading the same explanation in a direct quote from her in the 1970s. It was around the same time that she named her son by David Carradine “Free”.

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Roger Ebert:

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Every time I try to recall this film, I keep thinking “Suddenly Last Summer”…which of course is a totally different film.

I remember seeing Last Summer when it first came out in movie theaters. Wow. It was one hell of a shocker back then, although I would guess Law And Order on TV is probably more shocking today.

Still, for its time, Last Summer was quite a shocker and even X-Rated until the rape scene was re-edited.

Cathy Burns was brilliant in that movie as Rhoda…would love to see the film again to see how it holds up after all these years. All I know is that, back then, it had people gasping in the theater at the sudden and unexpected brutality.

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Not a chance - the police procedural shows on TV today are full of stock characters and cliches where the bad guys are bad and the good guys are good. The brilliance of Last Summer is that it’s full of ambiguity and unanswered questions - the characters are unpredictable and multi-dimensional, irrational, and yet likable at the same time.