Spring Night, Summer Night (1967) Online

Here's a film richly deserving of wider exposure. Can't someone pick it up for distribution? It's been described as "the missing link between THE LAST PICTURE SHOW and SHADOWS", which isn't quite on the mark. I think a better pair comparison could be made between the early semi-documentary films of Willard Van Dyke and Pare Lorentz and SHADOWS, due to the casting of unknowns and non-actors in all roles.

Seen nationally in 2005 as part of the Rural Route Film Festival (under the title SPRING NIGHT, SUMMER NIGHT), this film manages to focus on the taboo topic of incest without being sensational in the slightest, and that's only one of its amazing facets. A stark, black and white drama set (and filmed) entirely in southeastern Ohio, amidst the farms, gas stations, bars and simple homes of the area, it's filled with beautiful and memorable photography. This is not a "verité"-type outing of the "DAVID HOLZMAN'S DIARY" variety at all, but an extremely nuanced, melancholy tale of two lovers who may or may not be brother and sister (depending on which story they believe from which parent) with stunning set pieces on foggy hills, in musty barns, dimly-lit dinner tables, on dusty roads. Intensely moving and superbly acted, it feels nearly perfect and is a total anomaly for late-1960s independent cinema, so often considered an urban-based art form.

Joseph L. Anderson's "Spring Night, Summer Night" is another sixties exploitation movie to be rediscovered and restored by Nicolas Winding Refn but this one really is something of a lost classic. Anderson filmed it almost entirely with non-professionals and shot it on location in Canaan, Ohio. It's a study of a close-knit Redneck family and of what happens when the oldest son gets his half-sister pregnant and it reeks of authenticity, helped considerably by the stunning black and white cinematgraphy of Brian Blauser, David Prince and Art Stifel.

There isn't a great deal in the way of plot and the performances have a ropey, if real-life, feel to them but it's clearly the work of someone who knew his movies and whose influences were as much European as American but who went on to make only one other film before disappearing. Unmissable if you can track it down.