Once seen never forgotten, Frank and Eleanor Perry’s Last Summer (1969) is a penetrating, disturbing film about four teenagers exploring friendship, romance, drugs, and sex during a hot summer on the beaches of Long Island. A painfully accurate depiction of late adolescence, teenage morality and casual cruelty, it’s a coming-of-age drama like no other. Controversial upon release and as powerful today, it’s the definitive loss-of-innocence movie. The young cast includes an 18-years old Barbara Hershey as the manipulative Sandy, Richard Thomas and Bruce Davison as friends Peter and Dan, and newcomer Cathy Burns, who was Oscar-nominated for Best Supporting Actress as the shy, awkward, Rhoda.

Unflinching in its depiction of the raw, almost primal rituals of adolescence, Last Summer captures how teenagers actually behave, talk and think. Imbued with an otherworldly fable-like quality critic Roger Ebert called it, “one of the finest, truest, most deeply felt movies in my experience”, and Ariel Schudson wrote, “one of the most brutal and enthralling films you will ever see.”

Out of circulation for over forty years, Last Summer is a ‘holy grail’ among missing movies. Few film prints exist and the original negative is rumoured to be lost. Recent screenings in the US have all utilised a shortened 16mm print from the NFSA archive in Australia, so this event, using a rare 35mm print from BFI Archive, is the first 35mm revival screening of the complete and unedited version anywhere in the world.