He’s the captain of the high school football team

I've been meaning for some time to write a review of the film Beach Party. Actually, it's been a while since I watched it now, so it's hardly fresh in my memory. Also, I've probably got some work coming in any minute, so, all in all, I'd like, if possible, to keep this short and sweet.

I'm not going to give all the Wikipedia crap about the background of the Beach Party film series. I'll start, instead, by saying that the film is excellent. So, if you're short of time, too, you need read no further. However, to go into details: The film starts with Dolores (Annette Funicello) and Frankie (Frankie Avalon) – and here I'm reminded of the way Sid James (almost) always played a character called Sid in the Carry On series – driving along some coast road with a stretch of golden beach in the background, and a couple of surfboards on the car's back seat, singing the best song ever written, Beach Party Tonight, which can be heard in all it's glory here. For some reason that I haven't worked out, Dolores and Frankie seem to be driving around in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Anyway…

Soon after they arrive, the two starry-eyed young lovers are strolling along by the surf anticipating the wonderful time that they will soon be having here on the beach and in its environs. Frankie avers that, "The one thing I've studied this semester is you." To this, Dolores replies, with a mischeivous twinkle in her eye, "Well, I hope you don't flunk." Poor simple Frankie looks confused. The girl's got something up her sleeve.

It seems Frankie was planning for them to have a beach hut all to themselves, presenting such a situation to Dolores as romantic. Of course, what 'romantic' means in this case is that, being the red-blooded teenager with a forty-year-old's haircut that he is, he is hoping to advance their relationship to its next stage by doing unmentionable things with and to the winsome Dolores. Fully aware of this, she has invited all of their friends to stay at the hut, too, much to Frankie's vexation. He should have known she's not that easy! There ensues, throughout the course of the film, a battle between Frankie and Dolores, with each trying to make the other jealous by showing interest in other parties. In the end, inevitably, and quite suddenly, they realise that they were both being silly and they both love each other and so on, which really brings us more-or-less back where we started and renders the whole 98 minutes entirely pointless. I'm afraid I've given the entire plot away, but you probably knew it anyway, as some deep race memory embedded in the very cells of your body.

Much is made, of course, of "today's pagan rites", which basically means lots of very mature-looking teenagers dancing around in swimwear between monolithic circles of surf-boards. The quaint voyeuristic aspect of this depiction of pagan rites is legitimised in an interesting way. The anthropologist Professor Robert Orwell Sutwell (Bob Cummings), is observing these rites from his own beach hut through a telescope and with the use of bugging devices. He has a long brown beard that looks like a disguise (but turns out to be real), and at first has about him more than a vague suggestion of a peeping Tom. There is something rather humorous in this – a middle-aged academic 'studying' scantily-clad teenagers (perhas as Frankie wanted to 'study' Dolores) for the sake of his next book. And that humour, of course, gives the viewer the excuse to peep over the Professor's shoulder and through his lens. In doing so, they are merely 'laughing at' the professor.

However, it's round about here that I began to be surprised by the tenor of the film. I already had the film mentally pegged as the American equivalent of the Carry On series, a kind of 'Carry On with a suntan'. Therefore, with very British expectations to the fore, I was fully imagining that the Professor would be secretly rubbing his hands together lecherously while his delectable assistant Marianne (Dorothy Malone – lovely name), was not looking, and planning, all the while, with revolting and lip-smacking prayers to a Priapic deity, by hook or by crook, to find some way past the elastic in the waistbands of the swimwear of his subjects. But no. It was not to be. At one point in the film, the Professor saves Dolores from the unwelcome attentions of a leather-clad ruffian by the name of Eric Von Zipper (Harvey Lembeck), by using some ridiculously esoteric karate move to paralyse him. Dolores is impressed and conceives a liking for the Professor. It is even unclear whether she is carnally attracted to the man, or whether she merely wishes to use him to make her hotheaded boyfriend jealous. (Perhaps a mixture of both.) However, even when she seems to offer herself to him in all her swimsuited glory, he acts like a perfect gentleman and, self-contained, with no sign of regret, though rather fondly (but not fondlingly) like an affectionate uncle, demures. This is where my surprise began. The Professor was actually a really nice guy, and sincere in his work. I was impressed that the makers of the film had the chance to depict this man as a sad old pervert, but decided to go the other way and show him as a man of intelligence, integrity and many other admirable traits, despite being too dense, in his professorial way, to realise that his sassy assistant has the hots for him. And this is basically why the film is excellent. If this had been a British film, the Professor would have turned out to be rather a dank sort of character, with a moist handshake, who secretly beat his mother with a fescue, or perhaps was beaten by her, and who had gravy stains on his underwear. But in Beach Party everyone was clean and nice and healthy. Even Eric Von Zipper was nice, in a way, since he was too bumbling in his bullying ever to do anyone real harm. His running joke was to call his underlings and his enemies "You stoopid", the joke being, of course, that he was the stoopidest of all. It wasn't actually a very funny joke. In fact, it's more like half a joke than a whole joke, perhaps because the comic timing was never quite right, but you can't have a film like Beach Party without a few limp running jokes (limping jokes) in them. It wouldn't be right.

Almost everything about the film is excellent. The colours are of those almost hand-tinted variety you find in films of the late fifties and early sixties. Even when the jokes aren't funny, they're lively enough to be fun. And the hipness is ridiculously quaint. The Professor, in his anthropological way, wants to blend in with the culture of his subjects, and tries to pick up and utilise their slang. One example of this is the word 'hooting', which I can honestly say I'd never heard before (probably because I'm not hip enough). Apparently it means something like 'great', 'cool', etc. I believe it's Dolores who explains the word to the Professor, whose response is something like, "Yes, I see. 'Hooting', no doubt derived from the word 'hoot', to give voice to excitement, express enthusiasm and so on." Dolores looks at him as if she's never thought of this, and says sweetly, "I think you're real smart." Of course the funny think is the way the joke here has become kind of… telescoped? At the time the joke must have been how dusty and archaic the Professor was. Now, the word 'hooting' itself sounds dusty and archaic. And the same principle applies to the swimwear. Not a thong in sight! Thank god. In one scene Dolores comes to the Professor's hut to escort him to the beach, and she is dressed in her swimwear. The obvious implication is that she's wearing something sizzlingly hot, in contrast to the Victorian-looking item worn by the Professor, apparently presented to him by the fire department of Tokyo. However, even Dolores's bathing suit here, to contemporary eyes, appears designed to protect one's modesty. Actually, it seems there really is something in this. I do believe I read a quote somewhere – which I cannot now find – that Annette said the things she wore in the Beach Party films were more revealing than anything she would normally feel comfortable in. Whether that is true or not, it does appear that Walt Disney extracted from her a promise never to wear anything on film that was so revealing as to expose her navel. This promise was, in the end, broken on more than one occasion. (Ah, this appears to be something definitive on the subject.)

Having said that, there are one or two aspects of the film that I find questionable, irritating or ho-hum, in a minor way. To be honest, the character of Frankie is something of a 'low point' for me. Brash, earnest teenage nice guys (with enough of naughty about them actually to still be one of the guys) just aren't interesting. Also, I noticed, perhaps more with interest than annoyance, that the, errr, scarlet woman, to whom Frankie turns his attention in order to provoke Dolores's jealousy, Ava (Eva Six), "a prime asset at any party", is European, anticipating a pattern seen in later films such as American Pie that depict European women as decadent and of questionable sexual morality, in contrast to good, wholesome American women who won't let you study the contents of their underwear until you have graduated from the wedding ceremony. Apparently. And… maybe that's it, actually.

Oh, and it's got a cameo appearance from Vincent Price. That's a good thing, I mean.

I should also point out, in conclusion, that I quite like dank, too, but it's nice to have a change from that sometimes, and watch films about nice people being generally nice, if a little misguided in a farcical kind of way here and there.