Reeling Backward: Corvette Summer (1978)

Much derided at the time, this car-culture Mark Hamill vehicle is a breezy bit of entertainment straight off the jump, with some weightier notes about America's post-Vietnam delusion.

Let's get one thing straight from the go: The car is horrendous.

That’s the custom 1973 Stingray from “Corvette Summer,” often derided as the movie Mark Hamill made after “Star Wars” — seemingly his only role aside from Luke Skywalker, some have sneered. The film was pretty well death-starred by critics at the time as an ultra lightweight car culture comedy about a Summer teenager named Kenny Dantley chasing his stolen hot rod from Los Angeles to Las Vegas.

Generally speaking, if you’re going to center a movie around what is supposed to be the coolest car on the West Coast, it’s best not to have the vehicle in question be a completely laughable spectacle.

But that’s exactly what Hamill’s ‘Vette is, a beyond gaudy explosion of red glitter paint, a front clip that resembles the snout of Gru from “Despicable Me,” and mismatched sets of non-functional intake vents along the hood that look like a game of “Tetris” gone sideways.

How ugly is this Stingray? Let’s put it this way: only two were made by Korky's Kustom Studios for this low-budget film, a main and a backup, and the collector who bought the top car reportedly had it completely altered. Wise choice aesthetically, though I’m guessing it would be worth more in its original, homely state.

But here’s the thing about “Corvette Summer” — made for an ultra-cheap $1.7 million, or just $8.5 million in today’s dollars, the movie grossed $36 million worldwide, making it an incredibly profitable flick.

I’ve often said, half-jokingly and half-not, that the 1970s was the worst decade in America’s history culturally. It was a good era for movies and some TV, and little else, at least until rock music climbed back enough to overtake the (out)rage of disco. The clothes, the hair, the advertising, roller disco…

I actually remember this stuff, and still shudder.

Perhaps nowhere did the U.S. reach its nadir more so than automobiles. The car culture that thrummed virtually unabated from the 1930s through the early ‘70s was brought to sudden, screeching halt with the oil embargo and strict new safety regulations. Manufacturers turned on a dime from big, ostentatious steel chariots to crappy little plastic Euro-knockoffs.

As cars grew uglier and chintzier, our nostalgia for the good ol’ days of American automobiles zoomed into its wake with a vengeance. Car culture/road trip movies were quite the thing from the early 1970s through the early ‘80s, from “American Graffiti” and “Two-Lane Blacktop,” “Vanishing Point,” to the “Smokey and the Bandit” and “Cannonball Run” Burt Reynolds franchises.

Even “Mad Max” and “The Blues Brothers” arguably belonging to the genre as people stuck in Chevettes yearned for the throaty rumble of a big block V-8.

I’d say “Corvette Summer” lines up deservedly among these movies — a breezy bit of entertainment straight off the jump, with some weightier notes about America's post-Vietnam delusion snuck in.

It also features the first screen role for Annie Potts, a self-described “prostitute trainee” who skedaddles off to Las Vegas for her own reasons and winds up as Kenny’s partner/love interest/landlady/muse. Sexy, self-assured and full of attitude, it’s a standout debut in which Potts overpowers Hamill for our attention in every scene they have together.

Heck, even when she shares the same film frame as the Corvette, there’s no question which beast is better ogled. She snagged a Golden Globe nomination for her trouble.

Sure, it’s totally a male-concocted fantasy of what a hip girl is supposed to be — including that it’s her, not him, constantly pressuring the other for sex until they finally give in. The screenplay is by Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins, with Robbins also directing. They would go on to work together again on “Dragonslayer,” one of my favorite fantasy films.

The set-up is that Kenny is a graduating senior at Mac Arthur High School in Newhall, a north L.A. suburb. He’s a good-hearted kid who lives with his single mom in a trailer park, is pretty indifferent to his studies but is a born car nut who rebuilt his first transmission at age 10. He convinces Mr. McGrath (Eugene Roche), the teacher of the school’s advanced auto class, to pick the trashed Corvette out of the junkyard as their final project.

Kenny is the lead designer of the highly customized Chevrolet, and apparently comes up with the reptilian theme, which is formed into the car’s fiberglass body. During its maiden voyage down the Van Nuys strip, the other students label it “the top happenin’ dragon wagon.”

Though a group project intended to be sold to finance the next class, Kenny considers the Corvette his own progeny. He has vague aspirations of using it to get a job with the General Motors design lab.

When it’s stolen while a hapless classmate is fetching sodas — the aptly named Kootz, played by a post-“Partridge Family” Danny Bonaduce — Kenny is enraged when the cops seem none too interested in tracking down the Corvette. He furiously rejects their contention it’s already been shipped out of state by a crew of car thieves and chopped up, insisting no one would touch such a magnificent ride.

(It turns out he’s right, otherwise there’d be no movie.)

Hearing tell of such a car on display in Vegas, Kenny thumbs a ride through the desert with the idea of stealing it back. Along the way he meets a wagon train of Chicano car enthusiasts, cruising along the interstate at 15 m.p.h. in their hydraulic lowriders, proudly dragging tailpipes in a shower of sparks. Their leader insists showing class is more important than speed, and even poking fun at Kenny’s love of Corvettes as a strictly white boy thing.

He also meets up with Vanessa (Potts), riding in a custom van complete with hot pink upholstery and a waterbed in the back. It was a gift from her admirers/customers, and Vanessa is quite upfront about using it as a traveling domicile/workplace for her newly acquired vocation. Her real name is Eleanor, and she went to high school near Kenny, perhaps a year or two older.

She’s about as successful at getting tricks as Joe Buck was in “Midnight Cowboy,” and even turns up after a bloody pummeling from one. Discovering Kenny sleeping in a U-Haul trailer, she offers him a place to stay. They become partners as they each gain and lose various low-end jobs in Vegas, and have a running argument about how much Vanessa is worth in bed, ranging from $15 to $50.

Each is defined by their individual quest, Kenny to find his car and Vanessa to become a highly desired hooker. Eventually they both make it, and find their prize less worthy than the chase to reach it.

“I'm getting a hundred bucks a shot, and I'm doing body work just like you,” Vanessa teases.

Hamill has blue-collar charm as Kenny, who might as well be a desert planet farmboy for all his carnal interest, at least until Vanessa finally lures him into her ocean-motion bed. The movie’s best scenes are the ones between him and Potts, and indeed during production the working title was “Dantley & Vanessa: A Fiberglass Romance.”

The movie’s also got plenty of humor and the colorful background of Las Vegas, or at least its seedier side. I lol’d at Kenny excitedly chasing a hot tip of his car on display at one of the casinos, only to howl at what he finds: “A Datsun!?!?!”

Kenny spots the Corvette several times around Vegas and gives chase, unsuccessfully, once even literally walking past where it’s sitting out in the open in the garage of the Silverado Body & Paint Shop. This is run by Wayne Lowry (Kim Milford), a skeezy blond operator. His henchman include frequent movie heavy Brion James and chain-wielding Tico (Isaac Ruiz).

It turns out Wayne is a former student of Mr. McGrath, and the two have an arrangement where the latter finds suitable cars for stealing. The Corvette turned out to be too tempting to pass up.

It’s a huge moment of disillusion for Kenny, as he writes postcards to his former teacher updating him on his search for the Corvette and his romantic adventures with Vanessa. He clearly views McGrath as a father figure, and in some ways the teacher sees himself in that role, too, trying to impress upon Kenny that cars are just commodities to be bought and sold, like everything else in this world.

In a way, their father/son schism beats to the punch the one Lord Vader would throw at Hamill a couple years later.

Kenny briefly gives in to this dark side, accepting a job with Lowry for $850 a week to chop up other stolen cars, or more than $200K/year in 2024 bucks. He trades in his jeans and Ts for slick suits and tries treating Vanessa to a new lifestyle. Once he doffs his purity, though, Vanessa loses all interest in him.

Things wind up, predictably, with an extended and not terribly interesting car chase with Lowry. Kenny drives the Corvette back to his old school and hands over the keys to his principal, but refuses to turn in Mr. McGrath, leaving him to stew in his own dishonor.

I see his whole hero’s journey as a commentary — intended or not — on the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era where many Americans found themselves losing faith in the institutions of government, school, religion, family, etc.

Kenny is a knight-errant on a single-minded quest for his Holy Grail — “What’ya drink, motor oil?” Vanessa taunts — who has to forge his own code of ethics from the scrapyard of traditional ideals.

Though the car’s ugly as sin and the movie was trashed by most critics, “Corvette Summer” purrs along nicely at its own pace, a worthy ride into car-flick Valhalla.