That Certain Summer (1972)

Director: Lamont Johnson
Writers: Richard Levinson and William Link
Stars: Hal Holbrook, Martin Sheen, Joe Don Baker, Marlyn Mason, Scott Jacoby and Hope Lange

Index: 2025 Centennials.

Hal Holbrook turned the lead role in this TV movie down when it was offered to him, as he felt that nothing much happened in it. He isn’t wrong, at least from one perspective, but it’s a groundbreaking gamechanger from another.

He’s Doug Salter, who’s divorced with a son, lives in San Francisco and runs a contracting business. That son, Nick, who’s fourteen years old, lives down the coast in Los Angeles with his mother Janet, but is about to fly out to spend a summer with his dad, who he misses.

They drive around and see the sights, talk to each other in classic movie voices and host a party for friends and neighbours to celebrate Nick being there. Nick gets to see dad at work and he meets one of dad’s friends, Gary, who’s a sound engineer.

Late in the film, Nick takes off and spends a day riding the trams; he isn’t running away so much as he’s going walkabout to think about things, but it worries his parents, of course. He does come back, I should add, and flies home with his mum at the end of the movie.

That doesn’t sound like much, huh? Well, let me give you some context that may not be too obvious, context that makes a huge difference to whether you think much happens or not.

This is 1972. Doug is gay, which is why Janet and he divorced. Gary is what he might call his life partner, given that gay marriage wasn’t a thing back then. And Nick doesn’t know.

What happens here is that a network drama on American television—this was an ABC Movie of the Week—included a stable same sex couple for the first time, one of whom also happens to be the parent of a child. It doesn’t preach. It’s not overtly pro- or anti- anything. It’s enough that it treats Doug and Gary’s relationship as just that, a relationship, like any other.

Doug and Gary live together, though they’re trying not to advertise that to Nick, so Gary’s staying with his sister for a while. She knows and her husband’s an ally, even if he overdoes his acceptance. They wonder when they’ll get to meet Doug. The neighbours know and only wonder why Gary isn’t at the party.

Doug and Janet live in different cities and so don’t see each other often, but they’re cordial, friendly and happy that they’re each happy. I presume that Doug and Nick remain in touch, even though the movie begins with Nick flying out so there isn’t much opportunity to look at how they do so, 1972 not having cellphones or Zoom or the internet.

Of course, treating a gay couple like they’re regular human beings in love with each other and living productive lives was revolutionary for the time. This is really a glass ceiling film, snuck onto television on Wednesday night at 8:30pm Eastern, 7:30pm Central. I don’t know how they built up to this instalment in promos but it’s not immediately obvious that this has a gay theme, so people tuning in blind would have figured it out at different points. That’s a highly appropriate approach, because it’s how Nick finds out, entirely by accident, though he has been wondering why Gary is hanging out with them so much. Something’s off, but he’s fourteen and has no idea what it is until Doug leaves his watch on the fishtank and Nick sees its inscription: “To Doug with love, Gary”.

Certainly the critics appreciated the picture, as it won the Golden Globe for Best Television Film and a Primetime Emmy for Scott Jacoby, who plays Nick. That was its only Emmy from seven nominations; Holbrook and Hope Lange, who plays Janet, both lost.

I’m not gay, so I’m probably missing nuance here, but then neither were Hal Holbrook and Martin Sheen, who plays Gary. Holbrook found a connection to the character through its core plot point. After all, the story really isn’t about Doug being gay. It’s about Doug being gay and not telling his son. Holbrook was on his second marriage at the time and recalled when he and his first wife had separated but he hadn’t told their two young children yet.

Holbrook is excellent here, restricted by the network’s requirement that he and Sheen not touch or hold lingering eye contact. That gives him a serious air, which he fosters, along with patience. One customer flirts with him and he deflects her very gently, without having to tell her that he just isn’t into women anyway. His eventual coming out to Nick is powerful stuff.

Sheen is very young, this coming a decade into his career but before his breakthrough in Badlands a year later. Lange gets the best lines, like one to Gary as they wait for Doug: “If you were a woman,” she tells him. “I’d know how to compete with you.”

And Scott Jacoby is an impressive wildcard. Everyone else’s characters know their place in life; his is about to be turned upside down. He was sixteen, so older than Nick, but he does a fantastic job.

But Holbrook is why I’m watching; he would have been a hundred on 17th February and he almost made it, dying in 2021 at ninety-five.

Whatever we might remember him for most from a screen career that ran over sixty years from 1954 to 2017, he would surely cite one of his earliest roles as his personal favourite, not least because he played it for sixty years.

That’s Mark Twain, whom he first played in 1954 in a one man show, Mark Twain Tonight! It got him onto The Ed Sullivan Show; sent by the State Department behind the Iron Curtain; a spoken word album; a Tony Award and a first Emmy nod; and a show at the Clemens Center in Elmira, NY for Twain’s 175th birthday. Over sixty years, he played Twain 2,100 times.

He found television before film, racking up 287 episodes of The Brighter Day in the fifties, but eventually found the big screen in 1966 in The Group and became a Hollywood regular in the seventies. I remember him from They Only Kill Their Masters, Magnum Force, Capricorn One and Rituals, but Julia and All the President’s Men were just as important, if not more so.

He seemed to be everywhere in the eighties and onward, whether TV mini series like North & South, horror flicks like The Fog or Creepshow, comedies like Fletch Lives or big dramas such as Wall Street and The Firm, even a regular slot on a sitcom like Evening Shade.

He won a Tony and five Primetime Emmys, but not an Oscar. He was nominated at eighty-two for Into the Wild but lost to Javier Bardem for No Country for Old Men. He still had a decade of performances left in him, though, with his last roles on television in 2017.