Last Summer

A summer on Fire Island. Three young people meet on the beach: Sandy, Peter and Dan. Sandy finds an injured gull and nurses it, and the three look after it together. A fourth person joins them: Rhoda, odd, plain spoken, and not one of them. The three behave as though they are interested in her. As the summer goes on the dynamic inside the group hardens. Frank Perry directs. The source is Evan Hunter's novel and Eleanor Perry wrote the screenplay. The cast includes Barbara Hershey, Richard Thomas, Bruce Davison and Cathy Burns as Rhoda. The subject is not adolescence but group cruelty. How three people choose a fourth and slowly turn her into a target is at the centre, and none of them thinks of themselves as bad. The gull is the key, and the place where the tone hardens for the first time. Cathy Burns was nominated for the Oscar for best supporting actress for the part. The film received a restrictive classification under the rating system newly introduced in America that year, and the ending caused argument. Fire Island is a trap inside the narrative; the place is beautiful, empty, and nobody intervenes. Who it is for: viewers who like American independent film of the late sixties and hard youth drama. Who it is not for: the ending is very heavy, the characters are not sympathetic, and the film explains nothing.