Classic Summer Movies: Rainy Day Summer Films

Classic Summer Movies: Rainy Day Summer Films

Here is the best-kept secret of summer.

When it rains, the barbecue gets cancelled. The beach day drowns. The carefully planned afternoon evaporates in forty minutes of grey sky and persistent drizzle. And then everybody ends up inside anyway, looking at each other, and somebody says, "Should we watch a movie?"

Yes. You should watch a movie. You should have had this list ready since June (and we should have had it ready to help you).

A movie is never just a movie. It is a passport, a mood, a meal you consume with your eyes. The right film on a rainy afternoon turns four walls and a couch into a Riviera terrace, a Manhattan courtyard, a Roman piazza, a Las Vegas casino floor. That is the promise of this list. These are not homework assignments. They are invitations to spend the afternoon somewhere more interesting than your living room, without moving from the couch.

Here is how to spend it, with a selection of fun and entertaining summer movies.

Jaws (1975): Where the Summer Blockbuster Was Born

The mechanical shark sank on the first day.

Steven Spielberg was 26 years old, shooting on the open Atlantic off Martha's Vineyard, and almost nothing worked. The three mechanical sharks, built at enormous expense and nicknamed "Bruce" after Spielberg's lawyer, had been tested in freshwater tanks in California and performed beautifully. Then they hit the corrosive saltwater of the real ocean and fell apart. Pneumatic hoses leaked. The skin corroded. One model sank straight to the bottom on its first deployment. The crew took to calling the production "Flaws."

What happened next is one of the great creative accidents in film history. Because the shark refused to cooperate, Spielberg was forced to suggest it rather than show it. The point-of-view glide beneath the swimmer. The yellow barrels bobbing on the surface. The John Williams two-note theme that has lived rent-free in the collective human nervous system for fifty years. What began as a technical catastrophe became the film's masterstroke. What you do not see is always scarier than what you do.

Jaws opened June 20, 1975, and held the number one box office spot for fourteen weeks, becoming the first film to gross over $100 million in North American rentals. By summer's end, Gallup found that 21 percent of Americans reported having seen it. It created the template every studio still follows: wide release, saturation advertising, a movie event you could not afford to miss. Roger Ebert called it "a sensationally effective action picture, a scary thriller that works all the better because it's populated with characters that have been developed into human beings we get to know and care about."

Roy Scheider improvised "You're gonna need a bigger boat" as a running joke about the tiny support boat. It ranked number 35 on the American Film Institute's list of top movie quotations. Then there is Robert Shaw's USS Indianapolis monologue, a piece of writing so chilling it does not even involve the shark. A movie about the ocean turning against you, and there is no better thing to watch while safe and dry indoors.

Rear Window (1954): The Most Rewatchable Film Ever Made

Alfred Hitchcock built an entire New York apartment block inside Stage 18 at Paramount Studios and then filmed the whole picture without leaving it. It is one of our personal favorites of all time!

The set was the largest indoor construction the studio had ever attempted: 31 apartments, real running water, real electricity, a drainage system for fake rain, and a courtyard populated with roughly a hundred residents whose individual story lines played out in the background. James Stewart plays L.B. Jeffries, a photojournalist laid up with a broken leg during a suffocating New York summer who begins watching his neighbors through his rear window and becomes convinced one of them has murdered his wife. Grace Kelly plays Lisa, the impossibly glamorous girlfriend he keeps at arm's length.

Roger Ebert identified the genius of it: "aren't we always voyeurs when we go to the movies?" The film makes you complicit. You look through Jeff's telephoto lens, you share his obsession, and by the time the climax arrives you have earned the fright you get. What Hitchcock understood is the difference between surprise and suspense. Surprise is a bomb going off. Suspense is knowing the bomb is there and watching the clock. Rear Window banks that suspense across its entire running time.

A small biographical footnote that makes it essential San Martini viewing: Rear Window was the second of Grace Kelly's three Hitchcock collaborations. The next year she shot To Catch a Thief on the French Riviera, met Prince Rainier III of Monaco during the 1955 Cannes Film Festival, and by April 1956 she had retired from acting at 26 to become Princess Grace of Monaco. The most elegant actress in Hollywood walked off a film set and into a real palace. A real life princess movie! Cinema and Monaco have been intertwined ever since.

To Catch a Thief (1955): The Ultimate San Martini Movie

If there is one film on this list engineered for the San Martini sensibility, this is it.

Cary Grant plays John Robie, a retired jewel thief called "The Cat" who lives in a hilltop villa on the French Riviera and must catch an impostor copying his methods. Grace Kelly plays Frances, the cool American heiress who would rather catch him than the thief. Hitchcock shot it across the Alpes-Maritimes, in Cannes, Nice, Villefranche-sur-Mer, and along the Grand Corniche, and the whole thing plays like the most gorgeous travel advertisement ever made. Robert Burks won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography for capturing that particular Mediterranean light.

Edith Head designed Kelly's costumes. The fireworks scene, in which Hitchcock crosscuts between Grant and Kelly and the bursting sky outside the window, is a masterpiece of sophisticated innuendo that sailed past every censor of the era. The gold lamé ball gown was, according to Head's biographer David Chierichetti, the most expensive single costume scene she had ever done.

Two parts romance, two parts travelogue, one part comedy, just enough suspense to hold it together. It is sparkling, confident, and deeply pleasurable in the way that only a film made by people at the peak of their craft in the most beautiful landscape on earth can be. If you want to understand what European luxury looks like on film, this is your two-hour master class.

The Thomas Crown Affair (1968): Cool as a Life Philosophy

Some films are about a plot. This one is about an attitude.

Steve McQueen plays Thomas Crown, a self-made Boston millionaire so bored with winning that he orchestrates a bank heist purely for the thrill. Faye Dunaway plays Vicki Anderson, the insurance investigator sent to stop him. What follows is a game of cat and mouse conducted in three-piece suits, vintage sports cars, and a chess scene that has no business being as erotic as it is.

Director Norman Jewison and McQueen built the chess game from a real 1898 Viennese tournament match. Jewison whispered direction from behind the camera, telling Dunaway to trail her hand up her own arm to her throat. McQueen needed no instruction. The scene took three days to shoot and ends in a kiss. Nothing is said. Nothing needs to be.

McQueen drove the Meyers Manx dune buggy across Crane Beach in Ipswich himself, at speed, because he was a genuine racing driver who saw no reason not to. The Persol 714 folding sunglasses he wore became one of the most imitated accessories in cinema history; Persol still sells a Steve McQueen edition today. This is the movie that taught a generation what cool looked like. It still does.

The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999): Desire, Class, & the Italian Sun

Anthony Minghella's adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel is the darker, more intoxicating cousin of To Catch a Thief. Matt Damon plays Tom Ripley, a nobody who talks his way into a job retrieving a rich man's son from Italy, and then decides he would rather become him. Jude Law is Dickie Greenleaf, the golden playboy. Gwyneth Paltrow is Marge. Cate Blanchett and Philip Seymour Hoffman fill out a cast of extraordinary talent.

Minghella famously said they filmed "Roman locations in Naples, Neapolitan locations in Rome, Venetian locations in Sicily." The fictional resort of Mongibello was assembled from the islands of Ischia and Procida. The story moves through Rome's Piazza Navona, the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, San Remo, Venice's Piazza San Marco, and the Caffè Florian. Jazz runs through the whole film like a temperature reading: Dickie drags Tom to smoky Naples nightclubs, and the music becomes the language of class and belonging that Tom is desperate to speak.

Roger Ebert gave it four stars, writing that the film "is as intelligent a thriller as you'll see this year" and marveling at how it makes us complicit in the crimes of someone we should not be rooting for. It is a film about desire dressed in the most beautiful clothes imaginable, set in the most beautiful places imaginable. It leaves you shaken in a way the gorgeous surface promises it will not.

Baby Driver (2017): The Heist Movie That Runs on Music

Edgar Wright had this idea for twenty years.

In 1995, broke in North London, he put on "Bellbottoms" by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and saw an entire car chase unfold in his head, perfectly synced to the beat. Two decades later, he made it.

Baby Driver is about Baby, a getaway driver with tinnitus who plays music constantly to drown out the ringing, and in doing so choreographs his entire life to a soundtrack only he can hear. The opening car chase is timed beat for beat to "Bellbottoms," and it is one of the most purely joyful sequences in modern cinema. The entire film was edited to music before cameras rolled: Wright storyboarded every stunt to the songs and built animatics before a single frame was shot. A gunfight is scored to the Button Down Brass version of "Tequila," with every shot landing on a drum hit. A single-take coffee run is set to Bob and Earl's "Harlem Shuffle" and reportedly required 28 takes to get right.

Made for $34 million, it grossed $226 million worldwide. It holds 92 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and earned three Academy Award nominations for editing and sound, which is exactly the right category for a film built entirely on the relationship between image and audio. It is the rare movie that makes you want to be somewhere else immediately, preferably in a fast car with the windows down. On a rainy afternoon, it is pure adrenaline administered through the couch.

The Gentlemen (2019): Guy Ritchie Comes Home

After years of big-budget studio work, Guy Ritchie went back to what he does best: fast-talking British gangsters, a plot that arrives sideways and reveals itself in layers, and dialogue that crackles like a live wire. The Gentlemen is his return to Snatch-era form, and it is enormously satisfying.

Matthew McConaughey plays Mickey Pearson, an American who built a cannabis empire in the English countryside and wants to cash out. Charlie Hunnam is his unflappable right hand Raymond. Hugh Grant plays Fletcher, a sleazy private investigator who shows up at Raymond's house and narrates the entire story as a screenplay he is trying to sell, complete with an unreliable narrator winking at the camera.

Grant, nearly unrecognizable and clearly having the time of his life, walks off with the movie. Colin Farrell as a tracksuited boxing coach is not far behind. The film grossed $115 million worldwide against a $22 million budget and became a genuine streaming phenomenon, spawning a Netflix series. It is stylish, funny, propulsive, and very good company for an afternoon when the weather has cancelled your other plans.

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014): A Confection with a Broken Heart

Wes Anderson's film looks, at first glance, like a dollhouse. Candy-colored, perfectly symmetrical, obsessively detailed at every edge of every frame. Ralph Fiennes plays M. Gustave, the legendary concierge of a grand mountain resort in the fictional European country of Zubrowka, and his young protégé Zero narrates a caper involving a stolen Renaissance painting, a contested inheritance, and the slow arrival of something that looks very much like fascism at the edges of the frame.

Anderson uses three different aspect ratios for three different time periods and spends most of the film in the boxy 1.33:1 frame of classic cinema. The color scheme is a pink-and-purple dream that darkens whenever the political reality intrudes. Fiennes reveals here a gift for comedy built on the moral position that politeness is not a courtesy but a civilizational achievement worth defending.

Beneath the whimsy and the all-star ensemble, which includes Tilda Swinton, Willem Dafoe, Adrien Brody, Saoirse Ronan, and Bill Murray among others, the film is a genuine elegy for a vanished world of beauty and civility. Funny, fast, and when you least expect it, genuinely moving. It won four Academy Awards: Costume Design, Makeup and Hairstyling, Production Design, and Alexandre Desplat's Original Score. It holds 92 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. The perfect rainy-day film because it makes the world outside the window feel like a paler, less interesting version of what is on the screen.

Midnight in Paris (2011): The City Is the Whole Point

Woody Allen's love letter to Paris follows Gil, a Hollywood screenwriter played by Owen Wilson, who discovers that at the stroke of midnight he is transported back to the 1920s, where he drinks with Hemingway, gets notes from Gertrude Stein, and falls for Picasso's mistress. His fiancée, meanwhile, would prefer to shop.

Allen opens with a three-minute montage of Paris in the rain, and cinematographer Darius Khondji shot the whole film with warm, red-flecked, restaurant-glow lighting to make the city feel like the most romantic place on earth, which it is. Roger Ebert adored it, writing that Allen had made the film "for me, in particular, and that's just fine with moi." He praised Wilson for inhabiting a specific persona without imitating anyone.

The film won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Its final scene, walking through Paris in the rain, is a gentle meditation on the seduction of nostalgia and the discovery that the golden age is the one you are living right now. For the San Martini reader, it is the beautiful European city on film, the long evening, the willingness to be somewhere wonderful and actually feel it.

Ocean's Eleven (2001): Cool People, Impossible Plan, Perfect Movie

Sometimes the assignment is to watch cool people doing cool things in beautiful clothes, and no film delivers this more effortlessly than Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven.

George Clooney assembles a crew of eleven to rob three Las Vegas casinos in a single night. The cast includes Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Julia Roberts, Andy García, Don Cheadle, Bernie Mac, and Elliott Gould. Soderbergh described it as "a throwback. Nobody gets killed. There's no bad language. It's just an old-fashioned heist movie with lots of stars." That is the complete sales pitch.

It grossed $450 million worldwide and remains one of the most rewatchable films of its era because it is a movie with no mean bones in its body, coasting entirely on chemistry, timing, and the pleasure of watching very competent people at work. The perfect film for a mixed group of family and friends because everyone finds someone to root for and nobody is excluded by tone or content. Put it on when you need a film that will please everyone in the room.

Mamma Mia! (2008): This Is the One

Let us be direct: sometimes the assignment is pure joy, and nothing delivers it like Mamma Mia!

Meryl Streep plays Donna, who runs a hotel on a Greek island where her daughter Sophie is about to marry. Sophie has secretly invited the three men who might be her father: Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, and Stellan Skarsgård. Then everyone sings ABBA. The film was shot on the island of Skopelos and the Pelion coast and triggered a documented tourism boom to Greece that lasted years. It grossed $611 million worldwide against a $52 million budget on the strength of "Dancing Queen," "SOS," "The Winner Takes It All," and a cast that throws itself into the material with complete, infectious abandon.

Streep, who first saw the stage show shortly after 9/11 and described it as an affirmation of life, sings her heart out. Christine Baranski and Julie Walters match her beat for beat. The scenery is gorgeous. The feeling is unimpeachable. Is it high art? No. Is it the single best thing to put on for a mixed group on a rainy afternoon? Very possibly yes. This is the movie that gets people off the couch and singing in the kitchen before the credits roll.

The Big Lebowski (1998): The Dude Abides

 

Every list needs a closer, and there is no better closer than this.

Joel and Ethan Coen's shaggy-dog masterpiece follows Jeff "The Dude" Lebowski, played by Jeff Bridges with total commitment, an amiable Los Angeles slacker drawn into a kidnapping plot through a case of mistaken identity, mainly because someone urinated on his rug, which, as the Dude notes, really tied the room together. The cast includes John Goodman as Walter, Steve Buscemi as Donny, Julianne Moore, John Turturro as the unforgettable Jesus Quintana, and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Roger Ebert compared its plot to the warning Mark Twain attached to Huckleberry Finn: persons attempting to find a plot will be shot. That is the joke and the genius. The Big Lebowski is not about its plot. It is about hanging out with the Dude at the bowling alley, listening to him explain his worldview, and slowly realizing his worldview is not entirely wrong. The film bombed at the box office in 1998 and received mixed reviews, then became one of the great cult films of all time, complete with its own mock religion and an annual festival, Lebowski Fest.

On a rainy summer afternoon, watching it with friends, half-paying attention, quoting every line you already know: there is no better way to spend two hours. The Dude abides. So should you.

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