This was considered an important film in 1969, and Catherine Burns was nominated for an Oscar for her supporting performance. I saw it in a theater when I was in college, and I did not share the critical appreciation of this film or Ms. Burns. I found the film slow, and her acting utterly inexpressive, so it did not surprise me that the film drifted into obscurity. For years it was out-of-print, available only on the used VHS market, and there seemed to be no hope for an upgrade because there was no known copy of reel three. Fortunately, Warner was recently able to replace the missing reel, leading to this restored Blu-Ray release.
Last Summer was rated X when it was first released in 1969, but cuts were later made to a graphic rape scene at the end of the film, and the MPAA gave the cut version an R rating. The R version was the only one currently available on video until July 14, when Warner Archive released the uncut version on Blu-Ray.
From the comments:
Last Summer is based on a novel by Evan Hunter, and apparently follows the plot pretty closely. Evan Hunter was originally a pen name for a guy named Lombino, but he later made it his legal real name. As Hunter he wrote the novel The Blackboard Jungle (which became a movie) and wrote the screenplay for The Birds. But he still had other pen names, one of which was Ed McBain, and under that name he wrote a series of semi-well-known detective novels which became known as the 87th Precinct series.
Catherine Burns’ story is a curious one. One might have expected that an Oscar nod in her feature film debut would vault her several rungs higher on the fame ladder, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Her film career was over just two years later, when she was just 26 years old. She picked up occasional jobs on crappy TV shows like Love American Style, and worked in an occasional made-for-TV movie, but even those opportunities had disappeared by 1985, at which time she dove full-time into a new career as a writer.
She and her husband lived a quiet, private life in Washington state, where she died in 2019 at 73.
Hershey
Burns
Only caught it about 10 years ago, I thought it was pretty good psychodrama, & hey, Babs Hershey’s first boobage in HD at last
Here’s some trivia I just discovered. Last Summer is based on a novel by Evan Hunter, and apparently follows the plot pretty closely. Evan Hunter was originally a pen name for a guy named Lombino, but he later made it his legal real name. As Hunter he wrote the novel The Blackboard Jungle (which became a movie) and wrote the screenplay for The Birds. But he still had other pen names, one of which was Ed McBain, and under that name he wrote a series of semi-well-known detective novels which became known as the 87th Precinct series.