Summer books and movies
1 THE GREAT GATSBY A hot summer on Long Island, the height of the Roaring Twenties; F Scott Fitzgerald created a tinderbox of heat and desire even before introducing Jay Gatsby and his long obsession with Daisy Buchanan. Nick, Daisy’s cousin, moves out to Long Island at the start of the summer and befriends his next-door neighbour, Gatsby. By the end of the summer, Gatsby is dead and Daisy has retreated, with husband Tom, “back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made”.
2 THE GO-BETWEEN The novel by LP Hartley, and film by Joseph Losey, begins with schoolboy Leo’s visit one scorching summer to his much grander school friend Marcus, where he becomes fascinated by older sister Marian, (played by Julie Christie in the film) and finds himself drawn unwittingly into her forbidden love affair. It all ends with a violent thunderstorm and traumatic loss of innocence.
3 STAND BY ME “In all our lives, there’s a fall from innocence…” So goes the narrative of Rob Reiner’s movie adaptation of a Stephen King short story in which four boys go on a bizarre hike to find the body of a missing child. Set over the 1959 Labor Day weekend — which traditionally marks the end of summer and beginning of autumn — this exists somewhere between carefree youthful adventure and existential adult drama.
4 THE SEVEN-YEAR ITCH As the New York wives and children depart the city for the relative cool of Maine and Long Island, their husbands are left to sweat it out at work. In this movie classic Tom, nerdy publishing exec, finds himself trying to stand the heat of the city, as well as resist his fascination with The Girl (Marilyn Monroe), who moves into the apartment upstairs for the summer. A lot of convincing fan-work, and that scene over the subway grate.
5 THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY The kind of golden languor of director Anthony Minghella’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel, is summer as we all want it — a playground of privilege. Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow (pictured below with Matt Damon as Tom Ripley) are impeccable as the rich and indolent Dickie Greenleaf and fiancee Marge Sherwood, drifting from beach, to yacht, to dinner on terraces and late-night jazz clubs. No wonder Ripley wants to first be them, then kill them.
6 DIRTY DANCING Made in 1987, this started life as a low-budget gamble by a new studio, and went on to be a massive worldwide hit. The story of Frances ‘Baby’ Houseman, a nice middle-class Jewish girl holidaying with her devoted parents and sister at Kellerman’s resort in the summer of 1963, and her fascination with bad-boy dance instructor Johnny Castle (Patrick Swayze), is utterly winning. Great soundtrack, plenty of serious themes properly teased out, and no, “no one puts Baby in a corner!”
7 I CAPTURE THE CASTLE Charming coming-of-age tale by Dodie Smith (later a film with Romola Garai) that takes place between April and October in a year. Cassandra, youngest of the eccentric, impoverished Mortmains, chronicles their strange life in a tumbling-down castle, including the antics of her beautiful, frustrated older sister Rose, and the arrival of the Cottons, two wealthy American brothers who have inherited the nearby Scoatney Hall, and become the Mortmains’ new landlords.