Corvette Summer

With it finally getting colder around these parts, I thought about whether there were any summer movies I had watched recently and hadn't blogged about. One that came to mind is Corvette Summer.

Mark Hamill plays Ken Dantley, a high-school senior (stop laughing) in Southern California who lives with his divorcée mother in a trailer and cares more about cars than girls. One day the shop class, taught by Mr. McGrath (Eugene Roche), is at a junkyard looking for car bodies for the class' big senior project. Ken finds one that looks like a great restoration project, a Corvette Stingray, this being when the Corvette was a big status sportscar in the US.

So Ken and his classmates restore it, souping it up and giving it a paint and engine job that make it look distinctive but that would probably make any purist blanch. (I'm not exactly a car buff, so I can't really judge.) It's near the end of the school year, so the class takes it out for a night on the town cruising. Technically it's the class car, but since Ken put the most work into it and had all the big ideas, he treats it as his own baby.

Things go fine until one of Ken's classmates gets behind the wheel and goes to a local diner to pick up snacks for the class. When he gets out... the Corvette is nowhere to be found! This even though he took the keys out of the ignition. Ken is pissed, and wants to do whatever it takes to get that car back, even though it would probably be taken to a chop shop for parts because who can avoid detection driving a stolen car that looks like this around?

Eventually, a rumor comes through the grapevine that the Corvette might have been seen in Las Vegas. So Ken decides he's going to head there, even though he has next to no money and no realistic hopes of finding the car, just his faith. He has to hitchhike, which doesn't always work until a van stops by, driven by Vanessa (Annie Potts).

Vanessa is a young woman who must have watched Midnight Cowboy and thought that Jon Voight's idea of going to the big city to become a hustler was a brilliant one, as she's going to Vegas in the hopes of becoming some sort of hooker or escort or something that will land her a rich man. Not that Ken is that rich guy, but Vanessa being the steretypical "prostitute with a heart of gold", she takes Ken in and takes him all the way to Vegas

Surprisingly, Ken does spot the Corvette a couple of times, at least until the car thieves get wise to this and repaint it. It turns out that one of the thieves is a former student of McGrath's which lets McGrath help get Ken a job with the thieves that would of course technically involve him committing crimes. Ken thinks more about stealing "his" Corvette out from under the noses of the car thieves....

Corvette Summer isn't exactly a great movie by any stretch of the imagination. Mark Hamill is much too old to be playing a high school senior, and the movie is full of plot holes. And yet, there are still all sorts of reasons to watch it. One is that it has a sort of odd charm as you can't imagine these two naïve characters up against a world that would probably chew them up and spit them out in real life. Another is for the cars, which fans of vintage cars will enjoy seeing.

And then there's Las Vegas, which is as much of a star here as Hamill and Potts. Las Vegas in those days was known for the gaudy neon lights of the Strip coming from those casinos on the Strip; of course, the sun comes up in the morning and what's Vegas going to look like then? I actually had the opportunity to spend a daytime in Vegas around the time Corvette Summer was released. Our family did one of those "pile up the van and go across the country" trips in 1978, and overnight in the Mojave Desert we suffered a blowout which required spending the next day getting the car serviced at the nearest Ford dealership, in Vegas. My one memory of Vegas was that it was decidedly less glamorous than the pictures I had seen; I think Corvette Summer really captures that lack of glamour, and does it in a humorous way.

Corvette Summer doesn't show up on TV all that often, which is a bit of a shame, because while it's definitely worth one watch, it's not my first choice for what I'd pop in the DVD player. Corvette Summer, being an MGM release, did get both a DVD and Blu-ray courtesy of the Warner Archive.