70's Watch: Corvette Summer (1978)

Watched:  05/12/2026

Format:  TCM

Viewing:  First

Director:  Matthew Robins

I will extrapolate from just my own experience and say I think a generation of kids grew up a little confused seeing actors from Star Wars in things that were not Star Wars.  While Harrison Ford shook off that problem and became one of the most important/ lucrative actors in Hollywood history, Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill mostly did other things like Broadway or writing.  It's not like Anthony Daniels became big in the US without a robot suit.

But we all knew that between Star Wars and Empire, Mark Hamill starred in something called Corvette Summer (1978).    

My first memory of this movie was seeing it playing on TV when I was a very small kid, and for reasons I didn't get at the time, my mom turned it off, which - years later - I would come to gather meant the characters said something over my head and she saw this movie was straying into grown-up territory.

I'm not sure Corvette Summer is a great movie, but it isn't the camp or comedy I was expecting.  It's a coming of age story with lots of comedy, sure.  But it's not a laugh-a-minute romp.  And it is trying to say something about growing up - especially in the era when the end of high school planted you firmly in the world of adults (and their parents were glad to show the door).

Hamill plays a kid graduating from high school.  He's not had an easy go of it at school or at home, but he knows cars and has a dream to design them.  In auto shop, he leads an effort to rebuild a Corvette Stingray, and he does - creating a unique look with fiberglass and paint.*  

that car is the apotheosis of 1970's sports cars

However, on the debut night for the car, when the high school takes the car down to the main drag where people circle in their custom cars, Danny Bonaduce is given a chance to drive the car, and after stepping out to buy some Cokes, comes back and finds the car is gone.  It's been stolen.  

Hamill spins out until he gets a lead that the car may be in Las Vegas, so he begins hitching.  Along the way he's picked up by Annie Potts playing a girl who also just graduated and who is heading to Vegas to become a hooker, which she is *psyched* about (it is played for laughs).  

And this is where I point out how different 1978 was that nobody batted an eye that MGM made a movie about two 18 year-olds drinking beer as they drove a van to Las Vegas so one of them could become a hooker.  

The gag, of course, is that Potts doesn't know what she's doing, and she keeps trying to get Hamill, who has no money, to pay her for sex - and he's clearly not yet punched his V-card.  

The two wind up staying the summer in Vegas while Hamill looks for the car and Potts gives up trying to hook for honest jobs.  And, they fall in love.  The car becomes a sort of white whale, and the meaning of it changes over time.  What is happening with Hamill's character becomes a bit more clear.  

I don't want to say it's a deft script - I'm not sure it is.  But it does trust the audience to *get it* without explaining everything along the way.  Hamill and Potts are good.  And you get to see Dick Miller and a young Brion James. 

Probably the highlight is seeing a young Annie Potts who is cute as a button (if I'd seen this in high school, it would have been Instant-Crush City and I'd have been watching Designing Women for all the wrong reasons) and finding out this movie wasn't anywhere near as horrendous as I'd guessed it might be.   

*American car culture hasn't been what it was when I was a little kid since maybe the early 1980s.  Once cars became too hard for people to work on in their home garage, a lot of the romance went out of automobiles - and now I doubt people a decade younger than me believe it was ever real.  But 1950's - 70's films are a testament to the importance of wheels.