Summer is here—but there are no movies to mark its coming. With Hollywood in deep disarray and America’s movie theaters still trying to figure out whether they can reopen safely, it will likely be at least another year before the next summer movie comes along. But how will we know it when we see it? Exactly what is a summer movie? Can it be something other than a rom-com? Must it take place on or near a beach? These questions are harder to answer than you might suppose.
The composer and critic Virgil Thomson once wrote something that came to mind when I started thinking about summer movies: “The way to write American music is simple. All you have to do is to be an American and then write any kind of music you wish.” That’s a great definition, one that emphasizes the proliferating eclecticism of American classical music. Is it possible, then, to take a similar tack in defining summer movies? Not unless you believe that “Die Hard,” “Ghostbusters” and “Speed” qualify simply because they all came out in June. No matter when it’s released, a film must be unequivocally summer-themed to qualify as a summer movie—and even that alone isn’t enough. Does Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” make the cut solely because it takes place during a big-city heat wave? Not really.
Spike Lee (left) and Danny Aiello in ‘Do the Right Thing,’ 1989.
Photo: Universal/Everett CollectionIt’s more obviously tempting to say that summer movies are always comedies of one kind or another. This comes closer to the truth, though there is no shortage of exceptions, most notably such taut dramas of cultural and racial unrest in America as Norman Jewison’s “In the Heat of the Night,” Sidney Lumet’s “Dog Day Afternoon” and Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing,” in all of which hot, humid summer weather plays an essential part in propelling the action.
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“In the Heat of the Night,” the earliest of these films, came out in August 1967 and won a best-picture Oscar the following year. It isn’t hard to see why: it is a dead-serious movie that tells the still timely story of how a bigoted small-town Mississippi police chief (Rod Steiger) is forced to team up with a black police officer from Philadelphia (Sidney Poitier) to catch a killer. Poitier and Steiger portray in a convincing way the evolving relationship of the two men, who start out as sworn enemies and end up as begrudging but genuine friends. Forty-three years later, the scene in which Poitier slaps the richest white man in town in the face and lives to tell the tale still has the power to make an unsuspecting audience gasp with shock.
Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws,” the first summertime blockbuster film, is a drama of a very different sort, a roller-coaster thriller about which there is also nothing funny save for a few sharp-pointed punch lines (“You’re gonna need a bigger boat”), though it’s a summer movie in most other ways. It’s set in a coastal resort town full of happy visitors whose seaside vacations are bloodily interrupted by the arrival of a tourist-eating shark. The operative word here is, of course, “vacation.” Be it frivolous or serious, the plot of a summer movie lifts the protagonists out of their humdrum lives and sets them down in a place where they are free—or forced—to try something new. For most Americans, teenagers above all, that happens when school lets out for the summer, which is why the summer movie as a universally recognized, commercially successful genre dates from the release of “Jaws” in June 1975.
Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey in ‘Dirty Dancing,’ 1987.
Photo: Artisan Entertainment/Everett CollectionWhy so late? Because Hollywood hasn’t always catered to teenage moviegoers. Surprising as it may sound, I know of only one full-fledged black-and-white summer movie, the 1935 screen version of Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer-winning play “Ah, Wilderness!” It takes place on July 4, 1906, in and near a fictionalized version of O’Neill’s childhood home; its subject, however, isn’t a summer vacation but the everyday life of an idealized version of the playwright’s family. In those days, middle-class summer vacations were comparatively rare, and they were even less common in the Great Depression, when most teenagers held down summertime jobs that helped to keep their families afloat, as well as during the war years, when teenage boys either served in the military or expected to do so shortly. The ’30s and ’40s were years of responsibility, and it stands to reason that the movies that came out back then featured mature leading men (Lionel Barrymore and Wallace Beery, respectively born in 1878 and 1885, were the stars of “Ah, Wilderness!”) and were pitched to adult viewers.
Not until after World War II, when the Greatest Generation spawned the baby boomers, did middle-class summer vacations grow increasingly common, leading Hollywood to start making summertime movies aimed specifically at teens. First came the vapid beach-party movies and bland Disney family comedies of the ’60s, nearly all of which are deservedly forgotten today (though Turner Classic Movies exhumes them from time to time). Then Mr. Spielberg got into the act, and within a few years high-school students had become, as they are now, the target market for most American filmmakers.
That was when the summer movie came decisively into its own. Some of these films, like “Caddyshack” and “National Lampoon’s Vacation,” are pure farce-flavored comedies that seek to do nothing more than make a young audience laugh by any means necessary. But most fit more or less comfortably into one of three genres that admit varying degrees of dramatic weight.
The road-trip comedy. In these movies, a family or group of friends escape from their daily lives by hitting the road to elsewhere. A recent example is “Girls Trip,” a conceptually traditional but nonetheless riotously funny comedy about the “Flossy Posse,” four black women who went to college together but haven’t seen much of one another since then. They decide to rekindle their friendship by traveling to the Essence Music Festival in New Orleans, in the course of which they become entangled in elaborate romantic shenanigans.
From left: Annabeth Gish, Lili Taylor and Julia Roberts in ‘Mystic Pizza,’ 1988.
Photo: Samuel Goldwyn Films/Everett CollectionMore serious but just as entertaining is “Little Miss Sunshine,” an indie flick about the Hoovers, who take an 800-mile road trip to enroll Olive (Abigail Breslin), the littlest Hoover, in a children’s beauty pageant. A flawless comedy of postmodern family life, “Little Miss Sunshine” features indelible performances by Ms. Breslin, who longs above all things to bring home the beauty-queen crown, and Alan Arkin, her cranky, heroin-snorting octogenarian grandfather (“When you’re young, you’re crazy to do that shit. I’m old. When you’re old, you’re crazy not to do it”). While “Little Miss Sunshine” is wildly, wonderfully amusing, you are at all times aware of the shakiness of the ground on which the Hoovers stand, which helps to make the film so memorable.
The coming-of-age comedy. This is the most familiar and best-loved type of summer movie, perhaps because it can be either feather-light or weightier in purpose. That said, most coming-of-age stories, like “Dirty Dancing” and “Say Anything…,” are teen-centered rom-coms whose theme is sexual and romantic awakening. The category can be stretched to include Ron Shelton’s “Bull Durham” and “Tin Cup,” a pair of sports-themed summer rom-coms in which Kevin Costner plays an emotionally adolescent athlete who is personally and professionally transformed by falling in love with a mature woman (played by Susan Sarandon in “Bull Durham” and Rene Russo in “Tin Cup”).
On the other hand, some coming-of-age rom-coms tell their love stories with a fair amount of dramatic punch. “Mystic Pizza,” for example, centers on three women (perfectly played by Annabeth Gish, Julia Roberts and Lili Taylor) who work as waitresses at a resort-town pizzeria, all of whom are involved in romantic relationships that threaten to knock their young lives off course. And a few coming-of-age films, most notably Richard Linklater’s “Dazed and Confused,” are essentially unromantic comedies whose adolescent characters are trying not so much to fall in love as to decide what to do when they graduate from high school and can no longer hide from adulthood.
Dennis Christopher in ‘Breaking Away,’ 1979.
Photo: 20thCenturyFox/Everett CollectionThe coming-of-age drama. Some of the best coming-of-age movies, despite their funny moments, are not comedies but dramas about the complexities of youthful friendship. Peter Yates’s “Breaking Away,” for instance, tells the story of a 19-year-old working-class kid from a college town in Indiana who becomes obsessed with competitive bicycle racing and discovers himself by starting a bicycle team with his three best friends. Rob Reiner’s “Stand by Me,” based on a novella by Stephen King, centers on a quartet of 12-year-old small-town boys who go on a search for the missing body of another boy, a pilgrimage that teaches them the meaning and importance of friendship.
From left: Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Jerry O'Connell and Corey Feldman in ‘Stand By Me,’ 1986.
Photo: Columbia Pictures/Everett CollectionPerhaps the most touching of all coming-of-age dramas is Wes Anderson’s “Moonrise Kingdom,” an exquisitely wrought tale of two introverted 13-year-old pen-pals on the brink of adolescence (played by Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward). They fall in love and run away together to a secluded island cove, in the hope of fleeing the world of their parents and making what Roger Ebert aptly described as “a sort of jailbreak from their lives.” Accompanied to brilliantly apposite effect by the music of Benjamin Britten, a classical composer who was himself obsessed with the unspoiled innocence of children, it celebrates puppy love with extraordinary poignancy and sweetness.
Kara Hayward (left) and Jared Gilman in ‘Moonrise Kingdom,’ 2012.
Photo: Focus Features/Everett CollectionMy own favorite summer movie, Tom Hanks’s “That Thing You Do!,” is a boundary-crossing film that incorporates elements of all the above genres. The central character, played by Tom Everett Scott, is an aspiring jazz drummer who plays in the Oneders (pronounced “wonders” but comically mispronounced in the movie as “oh-NEE-ders”) a high-school garage band whose catchy pop-rock single comes to the attention of a hardheaded record-company talent scout (shrewdly played by Mr. Hanks, who also wrote and directed). He signs the Oneders to a contract and sends the band on a whirlwind cross-country tour that brings them in due course to Los Angeles, where they appear in a third-rate beach-blanket movie and a network-TV variety show, at which point Mr. Scott’s character realizes that he is hopelessly in love with the bandleader’s girlfriend (Liv Tyler). It all adds up to a charming road-trip rom-com that simultaneously takes an unusually hardheaded look at the realities of the pop-music business.
Will the pleasure that we take in summer movies like “That Thing You Do!” be diminished if America’s theaters fail to recover from the pandemic? Might they be by definition an experience whose effect is lessened when they’re seen at home via streaming video? I wonder. I’m sure that lining up to see “Jaws” in the company of an audience was an important part of what made the film go over. On the other hand, I’ve never seen such quintessential examples of the genre as “Breaking Away,” “In the Heat of the Night,” “Moonrise Kingdom” and “Say Anything…” in a movie theater, and I doubt I ever will. For better or worse, the center of cinematic gravity in America has shifted toward home viewing, and my guess is that the coronavirus will probably keep it from shifting back.
If so, I regret it deeply. Be it a big-budget blockbuster or a small-scale tale of summer love, there is no substitute for watching a movie, in the summer or at any other time of year, in the company of silent, enthralled people huddled together in a darkened room. Time was when that experience was the film-going norm, but it’s hard to argue with the twin siren songs of safety and convenience, and I expect to live to see a day—indeed, it may already have come—when watching a movie projected on a screen will be for most of us either a conscious exercise in nostalgia or a high-culture event not dissimilar in its demographic appeal to live theater. But even if that should happen, I also expect that the summer movie, with its joyous promise of collective escape from the ordinary, will be one of the last things that keeps American filmgoers lining up at the box office.
Mr. Teachout, the Journal’s drama critic, is the author of “Satchmo at the Waldorf.”
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