There was something that crossed my mind after finishing Last Summer. Some Warner Archive releases are nice upgrades. This one is a rescue.
Last Summer has been effectively missing for something like forty years. Never released on DVD. Never available in its original theatrical cut. A film that was a critical hit in 1969, that earned an Academy Award nomination, that people who saw it at the right age have spent decades describing to anyone who’d listen, and you simply could not watch it. Not properly. Not the way it was made. It sat in the vault of a defunct studio library, its negative incomplete, and it slipped out of the conversation entirely.
Now Warner Archive has restored and reconstructed it from the camera negative and surviving preservation elements, put the uncut version back together, premiered it to standing-room crowds with the cast in attendance, and pressed it to Blu-ray with a real supplements package. I’ve been covering this label at AndersonVision for years and I don’t say this lightly: this is one of the most significant things they’ve done.
I also need to tell you, before you go any further, that Last Summer is a genuinely hard film to sit through. Not badly made. Not disreputable. Hard. Let me explain what it is, why it matters, and who should own it.
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Table of Contents
What Last Summer actually is
Three teenagers meet on Fire Island during summer vacation. Sandy, played by Barbara Hershey, is the confident one, the girl the two boys orbit. Peter and Dan, played by Richard Thomas and Bruce Davison, are the boys: awkward, competitive, desperate to seem older than they are. They drink, they smoke, they circle the subject of sex, they nurse an injured seagull back to health. It looks, for a while, like a golden and slightly aimless coming-of-age story.
Then Rhoda arrives. She’s played by Catherine Burns, and she’s everything the other three aren’t: shy, plain-spoken, painfully sincere, carrying real grief. She wants in. The trio lets her in. And what the film documents, with a terrible patience, is how three ordinary, privileged, bored kids gradually turn their casual cruelty on the one person among them with an actual soul. It ends in an act of sexual violence, and the film does not soften it, look away from it, or let anybody off the hook for it.
That’s the movie. It was rated X on its first submission specifically because of that scene, and it played that way in New York for about five weeks before the studio trimmed it down to an R for wider release. That R cut, and later an even more heavily censored television version, are what most people have seen, if they’ve seen anything at all. The version Warner Archive has reconstructed is the uncut one.
I want to be plain here, because I’d rather you decide with your eyes open. This film is upsetting on purpose. It’s about how cruelty actually works among young people, the slow social physics of it, the way a group finds its victim. If that lands near anything in your own life, this may not be a movie you want in your house, and there’s no shame in that whatsoever. What I can tell you is that Last Summer is not exploitation. It isn’t leering, and it isn’t cheap. It’s a serious film made by serious people about something genuinely worth understanding, and that’s exactly why it hurts.
The Perrys, and why that pedigree matters
The film was directed by Frank Perry and adapted by Eleanor Perry, his wife and longtime creative partner, from a 1968 novel by Evan Hunter. If you’re new to the Perrys, know that they were among the most interesting filmmaking couples of the era, specialists in emotional damage rendered with unusual honesty.
Their first feature, David and Lisa, was a tiny black-and-white drama about two troubled teenagers in a psychiatric institution, and it earned Frank an Oscar nomination for directing on a shoestring. Then came The Swimmer, the strange and devastating Burt Lancaster picture where a man swims home across his neighbors’ pools and slowly reveals he’s lost everything. Perry later made Diary of a Mad Housewife. This is a filmmaker who kept returning to people quietly coming apart, and Last Summer is arguably the sharpest, coldest thing the Perrys ever made together.
The source novelist is worth knowing too. Evan Hunter wrote the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, and under the pen name Ed McBain he wrote a mountain of crime fiction. He knew exactly how to build dread out of ordinary people, and he later wrote a sequel novel to this story called Come Winter.
Behind the camera, Gerald Hirschfeld shoots the island in a loose, sun-bleached, almost documentary style, and that naturalism is the whole trick. Nothing looks stylized. Nothing looks like a movie. It just looks like four kids on a beach, which is precisely what makes the ending land like a slap. The score comes from John Simon, and if you dig into the soundtrack credits you’ll find an almost absurd roster of late-sixties musicians, including members of The Band and Cass Elliot, which tells you how plugged into that cultural moment this production was.
Four young actors, and one unforgettable performance
Part of the pleasure of a rediscovery like this is watching famous people before they were famous.
Richard Thomas was eighteen here, three years away from becoming John-Boy on The Waltons and one of the most wholesome faces on American television. Watching him play a boy capable of what Peter does is genuinely disorienting if that’s the Richard Thomas you know. Bruce Davison was just starting out and would soon headline the cult horror oddity Willard, before a long career that eventually took him to the X-Men films. Barbara Hershey was twenty-one and would go on to become one of the most durable actresses of her generation. All three are excellent, and all three are playing kids who are, to put it bluntly, awful.
There’s a lovely piece of casting trivia buried in the supporting roles that I can’t resist. Ralph Waite turns up here as Richard Thomas’s father, years before the two of them would play father and son again on The Waltons. Conrad Bain, later of Diff’rent Strokes fame, is in here too. You can dig through the full cast on IMDb, and it’s a strange, wonderful list.
But the film belongs to Catherine Burns. Her Rhoda is one of the great performances of the era, and I don’t think that’s an overstatement. She has a long monologue about a drowning, delivered nearly still, that stops the entire picture cold and rebuilds it around her. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and she should have won. What makes the performance so painful in hindsight is how completely she understood the assignment: she plays Rhoda as a person of real substance, and by doing that she makes what happens to her unbearable in exactly the way the Perrys intended.
Burns never became a star. She worked a while and largely faded from film. There’s a real melancholy in that, and it’s one more reason having this restoration finally exist matters. Her best work has been effectively unavailable for four decades.
Why it vanished
Here’s the part that fascinates me as a preservation story, and the reason I think this disc is important beyond the film itself.
Last Summer was released through Allied Artists, a studio that no longer exists in any meaningful form, and its library ended up in the kind of ownership limbo where films go quiet. Nobody was going to spend money restoring an uncomfortable teen drama with no franchise attached. The original camera negative turned out to be incomplete. Backup elements didn’t line up cleanly with the audio. So the film sat there, technically extant and practically unwatchable, for decades. No DVD. No streaming. The theatrical cut effectively gone.
It took Warner Archive going after it deliberately, gathering the negative and whatever preservation elements survived, and reconstructing the thing piece by piece. Then they premiered it in Santa Monica this past March with Barbara Hershey and Bruce Davison there to see it, and again in New York with Richard Thomas. Sixty years on, the people who made it got to watch it whole.
That’s not a home video release. That’s an act of film preservation, and it’s the exact thing I keep banging the drum about here. Streaming was never going to save this movie. Nobody’s algorithm was going to surface a difficult 1969 drama with a bad rating history and no stars attached to a current franchise. Physical media rescued it, the same way Warner Archive rescued a long-MIA film like A Night Full of Rain from the same kind of home video purgatory, or gave Boulevard Nights the restoration its naturalism always deserved.
Oh, and one more thing, because it says something about how hard this shoot hit the people on it. A seagull was accidentally killed during production, and it affected Barbara Hershey so deeply that she legally changed her surname to Seagull for a couple of years afterward. That’s the kind of story that sounds like a joke until you watch the film and realize how seriously everyone involved was taking it.
The disc: how it looks
This is the good news, and it’s very good.
Warner Archive’s Blu-ray comes from a new 4K restoration and reconstruction sourced from the original camera negative and surviving preservation elements. The film is presented at 1.85:1 on a BD-50, and the restoration reassembles the uncut theatrical version.
My usual honesty about my vantage point applies: I’m writing ahead of a full disc-in-hand screening, so read the picture notes as informed expectation rather than a shot-by-shot verdict. But the reports out of those restoration premieres were emphatic, and what a proper 4K negative pass should give you on a 1969 production shot this naturally is exactly what the film needs, which is honesty. Natural grain left intact.
Real, unfussy color in all that Fire Island sun. Fine detail in faces, sand, weathered wood, the kind of texture the loose handheld photography lives on. This film would be actively harmed by an over-scrubbed, waxy transfer, and Warner Archive’s recent work off negatives from this era suggests they know that. Anyone who’s been squinting at a battered old television print for years is going to feel the difference immediately.
The reconstruction angle is the part I’ll be watching most closely once I’ve run it. When a restoration has to marry the negative to secondary elements, seams can show. I’ll report back on how invisible the joins are, but the fact that they got the uncut version assembled at all is the headline.
The disc: how it sounds
Audio is the original mono, presented as a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 track. That’s the correct call for a film like this, and lossless mono should serve it well. What matters here is dialogue, because so much of Last Summer is four kids talking, and one long monologue in particular that the whole film hangs on. Clean, clear, unshowy speech is the entire job, along with room for John Simon’s score and all that ambient beach air. English SDH subtitles are included, the Warner Archive standard.
What’s in the case
Here’s where this release separates itself from the pack. Warner Archive usually sends catalog titles out with a trailer and a shrug. Not this time.
| Last Summer (Warner Archive Collection) | |
|---|---|
| Master | New 2026 1080p HD, 4K restoration and reconstruction from the original negative and preservation elements |
| Version | Uncut theatrical cut, reconstructed |
| Aspect Ratio | 1.85:1 |
| Audio | DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono |
| Subtitles | English SDH |
| Disc | BD-50 |
| Runtime | 97 minutes |
| MSRP | $24.98 |
You get a new feature-length audio commentary from screenwriter Larry Karaszewski and film historian Justin Bozung, which is exactly the kind of contextual support a film this loaded needs and exactly what was missing from some of Warner Archive’s other June titles. You also get two newly recorded post-screening Q&A sessions from the restoration premieres: one from the American Cinematheque in Santa Monica with Barbara Hershey and Bruce Davison, and one from the Paris Theater in New York with Richard Thomas. Rounding it out is a Trailers from Hell segment with Karaszewski.
Think about what that package actually is. Three of the four leads, nearly sixty years on, talking about a film they made as kids that nobody could see. That’s not filler. That’s history being recorded while it still can be, and it’s the strongest argument for buying this disc rather than waiting to catch the film some other way. There is no other way.
Should you own it
Let me split this honestly.
If you care about American film history, if you collect serious catalog releases, if you’ve spent years hearing about this movie and never been able to see it, this is essential. Not “nice to have.” Essential. It’s a major restoration of a genuinely important film that was on the verge of disappearing, it carries a strong supplements package, and it represents the kind of preservation work that justifies the entire physical media hobby. Buy it without hesitating.
If you’re a more casual viewer, I want you to go in with clear eyes. This is not a warm summer nostalgia picture despite the title and the beach. It’s a slow, quiet, beautifully made film about children being cruel, and it ends somewhere genuinely disturbing. Some people find it one of the most powerful things they’ve ever seen. Some people find it unbearable and never want to revisit it. Both reactions are correct. If you’re up for a difficult, serious, superbly acted drama and you know what you’re walking into, it’s extraordinary. If you want a good time, this isn’t it, and I’d steer you toward a gentler corner of the catalog.
Catherine Burns deserves to be seen. That alone would justify this disc.
Find Last Summer at MovieZyng
Last Summer is arriving on Blu-ray from the Warner Archive Collection, and you can find it at MovieZyng, which is the label’s dedicated storefront and, as I’ve noted in my Warner Archive sale guides, is run by the very people who manufacture these discs.
A film this good spent forty years effectively lost. Somebody went and found it, put it back together, and got the people who made it into a theater to watch it one more time. Whatever else you take from this review, take that. Go get it while it’s here.
