Film Flashback: Corvette Summer (1978)

I know that I should only be watching movies that have been (or are going to be) nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture, but sometimes an old movie will play on television and I just have to watch it. I saw Corvette Summer in a theater the year it came out and haven't seen it or even thought about it in the past twenty-five years or so. Then Turner Classic Movies, which has really expanded its definition of "classic," had it on late one night a couple of months ago. I recorded it and have just been waiting for a good time to get around to watching it again.

The film obviously attempted to capitalize on Mark Hamill's newfound fame after the release of Star Wars the previous year. You can tell from the poster that he's even posing in a way that would suggest that he's some kind of strong action hero rather than the put-upon high school kid that he actually portrays. I seem to recall that he finished filming Corvette Summer before Star Wars, but that might just be a faulty memory on my part.

This was the first time I ever encountered Annie Potts, and her performance is quite a shock if you only know her as Mary Jo Shively on Designing Women. As the prostitute-in-training Vanessa, Potts gets many of the film's best moments and funniest lines. In almost any other film it would be a star-making role. (By the way, she chooses her hooker name because she works out of a van...Van-essa, get it? Well, they can't all be gems, can they?)

In a sense, the car is the real star of the movie, and it's quite abeauty. If you were of driving age or even near driving age in the late 1970s, you would have known about the Corvette Stingray. This one is candy apple red with metal flake paint and some flame details on the sides and hood. It's an awesome looking machine, definitely worthy of a movie. 

The plot is not particularly difficult to follow. A high school shop class restores the Stingray after finding it in a junk yard, but the car is stolen almost immediately after the students take it out for its first drive. Hamill's Kenny seems to be the only one who's developed an attachment to the vehicle and he goes in search of it, a journey that takes him from the Valley in Los Angeles to Las Vegas. It's on that trip that he first meets Vanessa and begins to develop a "thing" for her. Their paths cross several times during his search for the Corvette, and I don't think I'm truly spoiling the ending by suggesting that almost any viewer should expect them to wind up together by movie's end.

The movie has its charms, to be certain. It's a holdover from a time when Hollywood used to make films about working class people rather than superheroes and the wealthy, and the kinds of economic considerations that would lead people like Kenny and Vanessa to take the kinds of life-changing actions that they do are certainly clear to anyone who lived through that difficult period in our history. Ultimately, though, it's just a straight teenage boy's fantasy about pursuing your dreams, getting both the car and the girl that you want.