Let’s begin at the end. 2 September 1962: the final night of the summer vacation; one last big blowout before adult life intervenes. George Lucas’s rambunctious salute to footloose youth paints vivid vignettes of Modesto, California, rocking around the clock with its loose-knit gaggle of characters. But this has one eye on the metre and knows that time is running short.
She’s in flight from her past and liable to combust any second. Paradise here offers little rest or respite. The professor has made a clean getaway, but she’s brought along all her baggage.
In which Natalie Press’s working-class Yorkshire lass finds an exotic foreign land just a hop and a skip across the moor in the form of the ivy-clad house of Emily Blunt’s boarding-school princess. Director Paweł Pawlikowski slowly turns up the temperature as the girls lean into the season, lounging in the dry grass and listening to Edith Piaf. They’re at once stickily close and a thousand miles apart.
David Lean’s tender Technicolor romance was one of the first British films to be shot entirely on location, strolling around beautiful, dirty Venice in the company of Katharine Hepburn’s middle-aged Miss Lonelyheart. Lean called for her to step backwards into the green canal at Campo San Barnaba. Hepburn gamely obliged and clambered out with conjunctivitis.
Sex and death ride shotgun in Alfonso Cuarón’s lustful field trip through turn-of-the-century Mexico. Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna are teenage buddies who light out for the beach with their engines overheating; Maribel Verdú co-stars as the exacting older woman who, if not quite steering them straight, at least helps point them in interesting new directions. A summer holiday list without Summer Holiday?
It would be like the Tower without the ravens or mistletoe without the wine. Directed with an easy swing by Peter Yates (his debut, and he would go on to make Bullitt and Breaking Away), this now stands as a colourful blast from the past, an innocent postcard from postwar, pre-Brexit Europe. A blue-collar bus mechanic – embodied by Cliff Richard – magics up a new route from Hertfordshire down to Athens, complete with entertainment and a flurry of comic misadventures.
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