Summer has most definitely arrived, and with it comes a slew of mega event movie releases. But these aren’t the films that define this sultry, sleazy season. The classic summer film is a sweaty mixture of desperation, rage, sex and violence, as evidenced by our pick of these classic summer joints.
Dog Day Afternoon (1975) / Taxi Driver (1976) / Summer of Sam (1999 – set 1977)
Whether it was due to the socio-economic fall-out of the 1973 Iranian oil crisis or the national daze that resulted from the raggedy end of America’s unsuccessful Vietnam campaign, New York in the mid-’70s was a scorched powderkeg just waiting for a spark. That spark duly arrived in 1977 when a bolt of lightning set off a chain of events that caused a ‘Son of Sam’ murders and the very worst of a series of heatwaves, so when the lights went out the city blew its stack and erupted into a rampage of looting.
Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon came to the boil a couple of years earlier in a tin-pot bank on the blistering sidewalks of 1975 Brooklyn, while Travis Bickle roamed across the Baked Apple in pursuit of redemption, connection and a really good gelato in Scorsese’s yellow-cab yarn, Taxi Driver in ’76. But if you’re talking about boiling-point urban psychosis, nobody does it better than Spike Lee. If his pressure-cooked in-your-face race riot Do The Right Thing fairly dripped from the screen, then Summer of Sam set the thing on fire – with disco divas, punk posers, racial tensions, serial murders and John Turturro as a talking dog all basking in Lee’s masterful depiction of the hot, hot heat.
Punishment Park (1971)
The only thing heavier than the weather is the metaphor in British provocateur Peter Watkins’ sand-blasted toke on the hot blue steel of repression. Made during the height of the Vietnam War, his semi-documentary polemic, Punishment Park, prods a surly bunch of peaceniks through the high Californian desert with a snarling dog-pack of trainee National Guardsmen hot on their hippy-dippy heels. The Freaks have three days to traverse the rock-strewn desert or face a lengthy spell in the cooler, while Watkins’ always-impassive camera charts their dusty travails with the beady eye of a circling buzzard.
Walkabout (1971) / Gerry (2002)
“You don’t want to go to the desert,” warns Val Kilmer in David Mamet’s overlooked Secret Service gem Spartan. Casey Affleck and Matt Damon would have done well to heed his advice in Gus Van Sant’s improvised head-scratcher Gerry, which sees them wander about the desert, acting up a storm and doing their level best not to dart a glance past the lens in the hope that their director might clue them in as to what exactly it is that they’re supposed to be doing. Nic Roeg’s Walkabout is a much more focussed but no more comprehensible tilt at the same set up, with Jenny Agutter and David Gulpilil paraded through the Australian outback merely so that Roeg has something to point his camera at. Both flIms are as confusing and exhausting as heat-stroke.
The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976) / Dune (1984)
Fast forward to 1976 and we find Roeg at it again, this time putting David Bowie’s serenely sociopathic spaceman through his paces on both the arid plains of his dying home planet and the dusty majesty of New Mexico in The Man Who Fell To Earth. The Thin White Duke would never look more desperately in need of a G&T ’til he rocked up as a surprisingly effective Pontius Pilate in the bone-dry temples of The Last Temptation of Christ. Dune further reminded us that even the chilliest reaches of deep space are dotted with furnace-hot dog-patches that make the Mojave look like Moss Side.
The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961)
You do the maths.
The Wind (1928)
The infernal heat and wind-whipped sand of the West Texas dustbowl push poor Lillian Gish properly over the edge in Victor Sjörström’s unsentimentally poetic frontier Western. The ever-harsher environment acts as a barometer for Gish’s isolation and mental dilapidation as the film goes on to explore some exceedingly dark territory for its time, with rape, murder and insanity all on the forecast. The studio – MGM – eventually felt compelled to tag on a happy ending to spare the audience from the unremittingly bleak splendour of a film that is as dry as a Mormon wake.
Ice Cold in Alex (1958)
Other than bacon sandwiches, Eddie ‘The Eagle’ Edwards and that 5-1 thumping of Germany in Munich a few years ago, very few things are as likely to swell the heart of your average Brit (read: advertising exec) as John Mills crossing the Sahara for a swift half of ice cold lager-top. Mills might be shell-shocked, alcoholic and saddled with German spy Anthony Quayle (who nobody seems to talk much about these days…), but he retains a few sandy remnants of both the Mad Dog and the Englishman and uses his stiff upper lip as a rudimentary parasol with which to shield himself from the pitiless sun – giving the Hun a bloody nose for good measure. Top work, fella!
Body Heat (1981)
Murder, betrayal and molto exploratory sex amongst the Palm Beach set is the order of the day in a cannily framed noir homage from Lawrence Kasdan that arrives dripping with flop-sweat and moral torpor. Thinning gigolo William Hurt reckons he knows all the angles, and scheming Kathleen Turner is more than happy to let him keep thinking as much while she spins the clammy web for which he and her rich husband are bound. Muggy with human weakness and oozing all sorts of nasty effluents, it’s the kind of film that makes you want to take a bath as soon as soon as it’s over.
Waterworld (1995)
This could have ended up being a very long list, with the unnerving naturalisto-porn of Austria’s Dog Days (2001), Henry Fonda’s empathy showreel The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and the winsome parenticide of concrete-crackin’ Ian McEwan adaptation The Cement Garden (1993) all coming under our lasers. Gummy, grimy and moist as they may be, none of them measure up to the cool-rockin’ daddy of all permanent vacations – Waterworld. It may, as entertainment, have as much going for it as Al Gore at the Oil Baron’s Ball, but in the ice cap-melting stakes it has no equal.
