Summer Rental (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Feb 19, 2025
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
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Director
Carl ReinerRelease Date(s)
1985 (February 18, 2025)Studio(s)
Paramount Pictures (Kino Lorber Studio Classics)- Film/Program Grade: B-
- Video Grade: A
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: B+
Review
Summer Rental is a typical comedy of the 1980s—simple plot, lots of gags, some slapstick, stereotypical characters, and one misadventure after another. In this case, a husband and father takes his family on a vacation at the beach to relax, and finds nothing but obstacles to his peace of mind.
Jack Chester (John Candy, Uncle Buck) is an air traffic controller whose supervisor notices a miscalculation that could have resulted in tragedy. Ordered to take a month’s leave from his high-pressure job, Jack decides that renting a beach house will offer an easygoing, relaxing vacation. A mere ten minutes after the film begins, the family arrives at a luxurious house, only to discover that they were given the wrong address. The actual house they rented isn’t much more than a hovel, but they decide to make the best of it.
More setbacks occur in rapid order. First, Jack gets a terrible sunburn. Later, he rents a boat and runs it into the yacht of wealthy champion racer Al Pellet (Richard Crenna, Wait Until Dark), a condescending boor who turns up repeatedly to flaunt his entitlement and privilege in Jack’s face. Jack makes friends with Scully (Rip Torn, The Insider), proprietor of a converted boat, now a floating restaurant. A grizzled old coot with a scrubby beard and a hook in place of one of his hands, he has the look of a pirate with a free spirit to match. Scully becomes Jack’s link with the locals and teaches him the basics of sailing, with a number of comic missteps along the way.
The big climactic scene pits Jack, his family, and Scully against Pellet and his professional crew in a sailing race. Jack’s boat is Scully’s restaurant-turned-yacht, The Barnacle. The race includes several other entrants, and assorted comic moments are interspersed with long shots of the yachts sailing majestically under the bright sun.
John Candy plays the bumbling dad with heart. Jack is a decent guy who wants his family to have a good time, no matter what negative situations arise. Candy is your average Joe who means well. He has the look of a dog who knows he’s in trouble yet can’t extricate himself from his own blundering. He plays Jack without undo mugging or glaring attempts to push the gags, which make his performance real, not a simple caricature of a muddle-headed dad. He doesn’t seek trouble but it inevitably finds him and makes his life anything but serene. Jack shrugs off the difficulties that befall him and tries to move on.
Richard Crenna’s character is drawn so broadly, he might as well be twirling a mustache and maniacally grinning at his own awfulness. He openly condescends to Jack in front of others, relying on his wealth and social status to get away with arrogance, superciliousness, and downright nastiness. Crenna’s dialogue is spoken with a haughty sneer and patronizing expression that communicate how dismissive he is of Jack.
Rip Torn adds his own brand of off-centered humor as an old salt who runs a terrible restaurant, is content to eke out a living near the ocean, and miraculously transforms his floating restaurant to a seaworthy craft in time to enter the yacht regatta. Torn plays Scully with squinty eyes and a devil-may-care manner.
Director Carl Reiner has fashioned a decent, if not particularly original, comedy with Summer Rental. His track record as director is impressive, with such films as Where’s Poppa?, The Jerk, and Oh, God! among his best pictures. Summer Rental is enjoyable, mostly because of Candy’s performance, but only second-tier Reiner. Many of the jokes are retreads of gags we’ve seen in other films, and the staging lacks imagination. Candy saves the picture.
Summer Rental was shot by director of photography Ric Waite on 35 mm film with Panavision Panaflex cameras and lenses, finished photochemically, and presented in the aspect ratio of 1.85:1. The Blu-ray features a new HD master sourced from a 4K scan of the original camera negative. Clarity and contrast are first-rate, with details such as items behind the bar at Scully’s restaurant, flowers in a funeral home, beachgoers sunbathing on a crowded, sandy expanse of shoreline, patterns in clothing, stubble on John Candy’s face, and women’s hair well delineated. John Candy’s sunburn make-up starts out very red, gets lighter and lighter as the film goes on, and gone by the later part of the film. The yacht race offers an explosion of color when the boats unfurl their multi-hued sails.
The soundtrack is English with English SDH subtitles an available option. Dialogue is clear and distinct. Sound effects include ambient noise of beach crowds, sailboats cutting through the surf, wind billowing the sails, one boat crashing into another and gouging a hole in it, a pitcher and glass shattering, and loud music emanating from Jack’s earphones. The score by Alan Silvestri is most effective during the yacht race. It adds excitement and contributes to the film’s big scene. Other music include Turning Around by Jimmy Buffett, the theme from Footloose, the Love Boat theme (sung by Rip Torn and John Candy), and Axel F from Beverly Hills Cop.
Bonus materials on the Region A Blu-ray from Kino Lorber Studio Classics include the following:
- Audio Commentary by Joe Ramoni
- Ear Candy: The Music of Summer Rental (10:15)
- Trailer (1:29)
- Spaceballs Trailer (2:36)
- Uncle Buck Trailer (1:59)
- Delirious Trailer (2:23)
- Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid Trailer (2:01)
Audio Commentary – Film historian Joe Ramoni describes how the film was set up at Paramount by Barry Diller and provides information about the politics at Paramount at the time. Ned Tanen, needing a summer picture, liked the script of Summer Rental and OK’d the project even though the script was a first draft. National Lampoon’s Vacation, made two years earlier, dealt with problems of a family on the way to their vacation, but Summer Rental gets the family to their destination quickly. John Candy had previously appeared in Canadian films. This was his first starring role. His character is the Everyman, the kind of role he subsequently played often. Ten minutes of scenes set in Atlanta focusing on the family were cut to keep the focus on Candy’s character. Most of the film—both exteriors and interiors—was shot in St. Petersburg, Florida. Director Carl Reiner liked to surround himself with “the best of the best” in terms of crew. He kept a tight schedule but allowed his actors to improvise. The relationship between Jack and his wife is similar to the classic relationship of TV’s Ralph and Alice Kramden. Candy and Carl Reiner wanted to team up again on Last Holiday, but the project never came to pass. The Paramount executives, recalling the many difficulties of filming at sea in Jaws, were nervous about shooting so much of Summer Rental on the water, but Reiner brought the picture in under budget. Reiner knew how to get the best from John Candy and made sure his character had heart. Candy was very busy in 1985, with three pictures in release. The film “grounds its comedy in a very real way.”
Ear Candy: The Music of Summer Rental – Matthew Chojnacki of 1984 Publishing and Jake Lemme of Rusted Wave Records recall seeing Summer Rental as teenagers and loving it. They speak about the process of acquiring the rights to put out a soundtrack album. They received master files from Paramount, and they discuss the process of issuing the soundtrack on vinyl. The music was remastered, and elements of the original poster were used to reconstruct the album cover. The score by Alan Silvestri moves the action along, keeping the yachting sequence exciting. Older songs in the film include Dolores (sung by Carl Reiner) and Tangerine, originally a Jimmy Dorsey hit. The Summer Rental soundtrack was released on CD and blue vinyl on Record Store Day, April 22, 2023.
Summer Rental is light fun with a winning performance by John Candy. Many of the jokes don’t hold up, but there’s a pleasant goofiness about the film that’s endearing. The picture never pretends to be more than it is—a good-natured romp about an accident-prone family patriarch on a vacation with myriad hiccups.
- Dennis Seuling