Summertree

In 1970, 20-year-old Jerry (Michael Douglas) returns to his parents Herb (Jack Warden) and Ruth (Barbara Bel Geddes) to let them know that he has dropped out of university to find himself. His parents are worried not only because they have wasted expensive tuition on Jerry, but the Vietnam War is raging and Jerry has lost his draft deferral. Jerry has plans to enter a conservatorium as he is confident in his self-taught guitar playing.

Inspired by a television advertisement, Jerry becomes a Big Brother to a black child named Marvis (Kirk Calloway). When Marvis is slightly injured in a fall, they visit a hospital where Jerry meets a nurse named Vanetta (Brenda Vaccaro). They soon fall in love, despite Vanetta being older than Jerry, and begin living with each other.

Jerry accidentally discovers an autographed photo of Vanetta declaring her love to a man named Tony (Bill Vint). Vanetta explains that Tony is her husband and they separated two years ago but are not divorced. Later, Tony (returning home from Vietnam wearing his Marine uniform) arrives at Vanetta's apartment and tells Jerry that Vanetta promised to wait for him. Vanetta arrives home, and Jerry leaves to let them clear their personal issues.

Jerry's streak of bad luck continues when Marvis's brother is killed in Vietnam and Marvis takes his anger out on Jerry, ending their relationship. Despite an impressive performance at his audition for the Conservatorium he is rejected for entry because he has had no formal musical education. Three times lucky, Herb visits Jerry to bring him his draft notice.

Jerry buys an old Ford Falcon and intends on going to Canada. After a family argument his father agrees with Jerry but urges him to have his car inspected at the local gas station for safety prior to his departure. On the day he is supposed to take his induction physical Herb buys Jerry a set of new tires. While Jerry looks at some road maps he overhears Herb attempting to bribe the petrol station attendant to fix Jerry's car so it can not run for a few days.

Jerry bursts into tears and drives his old heap out of the station into another junk car being towed by a tow truck.

The final scene: night, and Herb and Ruth retire to bed. As they close their eyes, on their television, news of action in Vietnam shows a dying Jerry being carried away by fellow soldiers.

Michael Douglas had been cast in the original play on Broadway but was fired from his role and replaced with David Birney. His father Kirk Douglas bought the rights to the play and filmed it with his son in the lead he lost.[3]

The title refers to a tree house that Jerry returns to sit in.

During the low-budget production, Brenda Vaccaro and Michael Douglas initially shared the same trailer, then began a six-year relationship.[4] She guest starred twice with him in The Streets of San Francisco, playing a rookie cop in season 1, episode 15, and a hit-woman in season 3, episode 2, during that time.

Roger Greenspun of The New York Times did not care for the film:

Summertree is a bad movie, but its badness proceeds not from its intentions, which seem honorable, or from its stylistic analogies to past modes, which in different hands could have been interesting. The badness exists, rather, moment by moment, in the insufficiency of each acted scene, in the niggling insecurity of Newley's camera, in the improverishment of each evocation of a quality of life—from the boy's dull guitar playing, which is supposed to be great, to the father's love of hunting, which should recreate the landscape, but only signifies a thoughtless and cruel pastime.[5]

Variety wrote "Newley brings individual scenes beautifully to life, with Douglas clearly defining his role as the personable-but-self-centered hero. Miss Vaccaro, despite the character's indecisiveness, is charming. The two of them make their love story fresh and believable."[6] Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film 2 stars out of 4 and called it "occasionally moving," but found the relationships to "lack believability" and the ending "an ironic statement that is decidedly out of place."[7] Richard Combs of The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote that Michael Douglas' performance "has an energy and vitality that gives an edge to the theme of wasted youth. Other elements in Summertree blend less successfully—the contrived spontaneity of Jerry's romance with Vanetta and the fragmentary treatment of his relationship with the negro boy. Anthony Newley's direction, however, is surprisingly unselfconscious and reponsive to a talented cast, though there is little he can do with the over-neat tying together of all the ironies in the last half hour."[8]

• List of American films of 1971

• Summertree at IMDb
• Summertree at AllMovie