Released in the United States on June 19, 1969, Last Summer received generally positive reviews, with Burns garnering an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

[3] Dan and Peter, two youths vacationing on Fire Island, befriend a young woman named Sandy, who has found an injured seagull on a beach.

The trio make the acquaintance of a slightly younger teenager, Rhoda, a shy girl who confides in the others that her mother died in a drowning accident.

[4] Last Summer was one of a handful of high-profile X-rated movies that were released in 1969, along with the Best Picture Oscar winner Midnight Cowboy and Haskell Wexler's docudrama Medium Cool.

[7] The scene was edited shortly after its initial theatrical release so the film could receive an R-rating, though this version still contained nudity and strong language.

When the film was occasionally broadcast for television, a further-censored PG-rated version was presented, which cuts all nudity and heavily edits the scene of Rhoda's rape.

For the first time in your life important things were happening to you; you were growing up; what mattered to you made a difference...[On] top of the desire to be brave and honorable, there was also the compelling desire to be accepted, to be admitted to membership in that adolescent society defined only by those excluded from it...Frank Perry's Last Summer is about exactly such years and days, about exactly that time in the life of four 15- or 16-year-old adolescents, and it is one of the finest, truest, most deeply felt movies in my experience.