Interview: John Malahy, author of TCM's new Summer Movies book

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

People like to talk about how movies can provide an escape, but so many of the big blockbusters I see every summer are about the near, sometimes total, destruction of a place. Godzilla wipes out a city, Will Smith watches the world’s monuments burn and tries to save the rest of the planet, Thanos kills half of every living thing in the universe.

The true escapist films are about a couple people falling in love on a vacation or preparing for a bike race or trying to navigate a dozen neighborhood conflicts as the temperature rises and rises and rises. John Malahy's Summer Movies, out now from Turner Classic Movies, is a book about 30 movies that capture the feeling of summer, even if only a handful of them were ever any studio's tentpole July 4 weekend releases. Malahy covers films I've seen a million times (The Music Man), that I've been profoundly moved by (Before Sunrise) and semi-forgotten entries in the summer canon I haven't seen but was happy to have him guide me through (You're Only Young Once). It's an insightful book that feels like summer, down to the beach party movie poster art direction. I read it front-to-back and immediately wanted to read another 30 essays (I know this sounds like pull-quote bait, but, especially after being cooped up for a year-and-a-half, I take my vacations of the mind where I can).

John was kind enough to answer some of my questions, about his book specifically and summer movies in general, over email.

MovieJawn: What's the first movie you remember feeling like summer?

John Malahy: Of the movies featured in the book, I almost definitely knew of National Lampoon’s Vacation first, due to growing up in the ‘80s and my family watching it together. (I think my parents must have fast-forwarded through certain scenes.) We took a big family road trip from Oklahoma to California when I was five or six – ending at Disneyland – and there were constant references to the Griswolds. A few years later, over winter break, I watched another road trip film that isn’t technically set in summer: The Muppet Movie. But seeing it in a cold December made the movie feel summery to me – probably because of their drive through the desert and ending in sunny California – and of course I connected it with my own family vacations. I don’t know if it would apply to the book, but it’s about someone (in this case, Kermit the Frog) who changes his life by venturing out on the road – a classic summertime plot.

MJ: The range of movies you cover here is pretty staggering. Is there anything you wanted to include but just couldn't justify?

JM: I had a working list of over 300 movies (and I find myself still adding to it as I come across more) and narrowed it down to a manageable number, so there were inevitably a few that just didn’t make the cut for one reason or another. One example is Viva Las Vegas, which I believe does take place in the summer and is set at a resort hotel, but just felt a bit redundant when I already had a mid-sixties musical included (Beach Blanket Bingo). Similarly, there are a lot of surfing movies that got left out because of space – like the Hawaii-set Ride the Wild Surf – and movies about baseball (sorry, Bull Durham and Take Me Out to the Ball Game).

I also tried to make Esther Williams fit. Her films, like the swimming biopic Million Dollar Mermaid, feel summery to me, but don’t really tell stories about the season. The same goes for other movies about actual mermaids, like Splash.

Darker genres were hard to justify too, given their tone. I include the crime film Key Largo because of the hurricane element, but Friday the 13th was vetoed since I already had other summer camp and lake-set films included. (I also had 2019’s Crawl on my long list, but maybe it’s too recent to classify as a classic?)

MJ: Conversely, is there anything you didn't want to write about but that felt too relevant to the summer movie genre to disregard?

JM: There are a few films that I think aren’t necessarily of high quality but needed to be represented anyway. I’m thinking of Beach Blanket Bingo, which I think is the best of AIP’s Beach Party series but is definitely a bit dated and zany. I’ve seen it several times in the last year, but I’m still a little unsure of how to wrap my head around it. Picnic is another that feels more of a relic of its time: a melodrama made under production code restrictions, which means it has to treat its incredible sexual energy in a tasteful and chaste way (I’d like to see a remake). But I think it’s still of value as entertainment, especially the extended Labor Day picnic sequence. With both of these films, viewers just have to give themselves over to the style and tone.

MJ: In the introduction, you talk about how summer movies aren't really that diverse. I think Breaking Away is the first movie in the book that has anything to say about class and then it takes ten years for Do The Right Thing to come along and offer another set of characters who couldn't afford a Hardy family summer. Does that hurt the escapism inherent to summer movies?

JM: That’s an interesting point about Breaking Away. In that movie, the characters’ economic disadvantage is why their post-graduation summer is so aimless (and feels so endless). Perhaps this is a result of the era in which it was made, and the kinds of young characters that were getting featured. (The Graduate dealt with similar emotional territory a decade earlier, but its main character was wealthy.) Classic Hollywood is working class characters, from Modern Times to Marty, but summer was rarely foregrounded in these stories, and their focus wasn’t on kids with mid-year breaks and opportunities for self-discovery. (If Breaking Away was a story about Paul Dooley’s father character, it probably wouldn’t be a ‘summer’ movie.) In the post-60s, New Hollywood era, there were plenty of movies about younger characters, adolescence, and trying to figure out your way in the world. And some of these kids have a working-class background – an added challenge that Benjamin Braddock didn’t have to worry about.

My parameters for this book didn’t include the concept of escapism as it’s often applied to big summer blockbusters and studio tentpole films. I just wanted to stay true to universal experiences of the season, and in some cases the oppressive heat, as in Do the Right Thing (and Rear Window), is both a reality for millions of people and also the catalyst for drama.

MJ: Why were these films, by and large, so progressive with their women characters (even if, as you note in the Gidget entry, they're studio films having their cake and eating it with their gender dynamics)?

JM: You see these dynamic women characters most often in classic-era films (like Summer Stock from 1950) and my interpretation is that studios were able to take more risks in the days when actors were under contract and they had control over exhibition. In those days the weekly audience was much larger, and studios were pumping out films much rapidly to meet demand. As much flack as that system gets, it was one in which people like Bette Davis were able to thrive.

Gidget was a bestselling book, which explains why it was picked up by Hollywood. Of the later films, Dirty Dancing is a feminist film with a strong lead, but it was made and distributed independently. A League of Their Own was directed by a woman, but only after she had made a couple of box office successes. Even though such movies wound up being hits, they’re still considered risky by a notoriously risk-averse film industry.

MJ: Do these movies feel different to you in winter?

JM: I think the winter helps put them into perspective. After the holidays pass, I think most people spend the rest of the winter dreaming of summer – and making their vacation plans. I wrote most of the book in the winter and finished it in the pandemic, and as someone who loves a good long plane flight, it was nice to be able to experience travel through the characters in these films.

Summertime, especially. It’s a film set (and shot on location) in Venice, Italy, and I had spent a week in the city a few years back and visited a lot of the locations from the film. Italy was hit hard during the early months of COVID, so it was extra poignant to see it on film in such a good light.

MJ: If you were programming a three-film-long block of summer movies for TCM, which would you choose?

JM: If we’re going for the most essential, I’d pick Gidget, Jaws, and National Lampoon’s Vacation. Those are the most iconic films from the book, and they remain cultural touchstones decades after their releases. For my personal favorites, I’d pick Rear Window, Summertime, and Before Sunrise. Those are three magical films that I could probably watch all day, on a loop.

MJ: Coming off a pandemic, are there any films in the book you're especially itching to see on a big screen?

JM: All of them! They should all be seen on the biggest screen possible, and that’s even more true for the older titles. I think the silent film Lonesome would be so much more powerful projected big in a dark theater with an audience, rather than on my living room TV. The Technicolor brilliance of something like State Fair would benefit from that size too.

I’d personally love to see The Endless Summer on the big screen, given that it’s a movie that played in a theater in New York for many months back in its original release. It captivated audiences at the time, most of whom hadn’t seen a surfing documentary before. I’d love to experience that, too.

MJ: Is there any way for the beach movie to make a comeback?

JM: At their heart, beach movies represented a world in which teenagers reigned supreme, away from their parents and the demands of the real world. Kids made the rules, and it shows even in some of the plot mechanics (Beach Blanket Bingo includes a romantic subplot with a mermaid and ends with a ridiculous silent-era chase sequence.) I’m not sure what the modern equivalent would be – perhaps the High School Musical films came closest, although they were much tamer. And the TV show Glee has a few similarities.

In terms of a beach setting, I think a renewed widespread interest in surfing as a sport could lead to a revival. After all, Gidget is what kicked things off the first time around. The Tokyo Olympics will feature surfing for the first time in competition this summer – so I’ll keep my fingers crossed!