A film
review by Michael Reuben for blu-ray.com on July 27, 2017.
Where the Boys Are appeared in 1960, the same year as
the setting for the 2007 opening season of TV's Mad Men, and both are time capsules of the manners and mores of a
bygone era. The difference is that Mad
Men reinvented that time with an often ironic awareness of what would
follow it, whereas Where the Boys Are
represents its age without detachment. Adapted from a popular novel by Glendon Swarthout (who also wrote The Shootist), the film was billed as a
teen comedy, one of the first, and it helped spawn an entire sub-genre of
beach-themed entertainments, including the Beach
Party series starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello.
But Where the Boys Are had something more
serious on its mind, which is why it plays today as an uneasy mixture of broad
farce and romantic melodrama. In an era when the Hays Code still
strait-jacketed filmmakers from dealing honestly with sexual relations, Where the Boys Are used humor and
euphemism to bypass screen taboos. If much of the film's creative
circumlocution seems quaint today, it's largely because Where the Boys Are anatomizes a template of morality that, within
just a few years, would be shredded by the sexual revolution of the Sixties.
It's worth noting that the film's year of release was also the first year that
birth control pills became widely available, thereby transforming the female
sexual calculus on which the Where the
Boys Are plot largely depends.
The Warner
Archive Collection has remastered Where
the Boys Are for Blu-ray with a new transfer that showcases director Henry Levin's (Journey to the Center of the Earth) widescreen compositions and
location photography. With its (now) politically incorrect depictions of good girls vs. bad, the film is a fascinating museum piece, enlivened by lead
performances that include the screen debuts of singer Connie Francis and newcomer Paula
Prentiss, who would go on to become a familiar figure in both film and TV,
equally famous for her talents as a comedienne and her durable marriage to
actor/director (and sometime co-star) Richard Benjamin.
Where the Boys Are traces the adventures of four
freshman women who depart their snowy campus up north for spring break on the
Florida beaches of Ft. Lauderdale, because that's where the boys are. Over the course of a frenetic week, the
foursome experience adventures that are sometimes comic, sometimes romantic and
sometimes traumatic. Meanwhile, the population of their cut-rate motel room
expands every night, as they continue to take in penniless students and strays.
The film
establishes its relationship issues in an early classroom scene where Merritt
Andrews (Dolores Hart) offers an impromptu
class presentation on premarital sex - or, in the carefully chosen word of the Where the Boys Are script, emotional involvement and playing house. Merritt scandalizes her
teacher, whose ironic name is Dr. Raunch (Amy
Douglass), and thrills the entire class by acknowledging what all of them
already know, which is that girls are now expected to indulge their boyfriends'
desires and those who withhold their favors quickly become unpopular. Still,
when Merritt and her friends reach Florida, she struggles to remain a good girl, and the story rewards her
with the catch of the season in the person of Ryder Smith (George Hamilton), a Princeton legacy and heir who sweeps Merritt
off her feet, but not into bed, with his good looks and charm - not to mention
his yacht, mansion and butler. Merritt's friend, Melanie Tolman (Yvette Mimieux), takes the opposite
approach, throwing herself into the holiday spirit, drinking to the point of
collapse and dating a revolving door of Ivy Leaguers (or so they say) with
whom, we are meant to infer, she shares a different bed every night. Where
Merritt is rewarded for being good,
Melanie is ultimately punished for being bad,
and the film treats her punishment as unfortunate but deserved. (If you can't
take date rape in stride, Where the Boys
Are isn't the film for you.)
The
group's other two members endure more comfortingly comic romantic
entanglements. Angie (Connie Francis)
finds herself attached to an eccentric musician named Basil (Frank Gorshin), whose band plays dialectic jazz and who doesn't begin to
notice the diminutive co-ed until she opens her mouth to sing and the voice of
Connie Francis emerges. (Producer Joe
Pasternak actively recruited the singer for the role, even though she was
more interested in continuing her successful recording and touring career.) The
exceptionally tall Tuggle Carpenter (Paula
Prentiss) is paired with an even taller admirer whose name is equally
unlikely: TV Thompson (Jim Hutton), so dubbed because he
aspires to work in television, which may explain why he delivers every sentence
as if he were speaking into a microphone. TV
routinely bemoans his lack of success with women, but Tuggle sees in him a
candidate to help her achieve her life's ambition, which is to become a married
baby-making machine. (One wonders why
she's bothering with college.) The budding relationship hits a snag when Tuggle
refuses to sleep with TV - it's one
of the film's most overt sexual negotiations - and the disappointed suitor
finds his attention straying to a big-chested platinum blonde nightclub
performer with the appropriately seductive name of Lola Fandango (Barbara Nichols, aka Queen of the B Movies).
Where the Boys Are maintains a light-hearted tone
throughout most of its running time, effectively exemplified by Ft.
Lauderdale's beleaguered police captain (Chill
Wills), who warns his officers to expect
anything and to maintain a sense of humor because you're gonna need it if you want to survive! Routine police
broadcasts dispatching law enforcement to the latest scene of student excess
provide a humorous narration, much like the loudspeaker announcements in M.A.S.H. TV's brief dalliance with the pneumatic Ms. Fandango results in a
slapstick disaster that lands most of the group in police custody, from which
Lola extricates them with a classic dumb blonde plea. But then, in its final
twenty minutes, Where the Boys Are
turns deadly serious - and it also reveals the prudish underpinnings of the
sexual teases that have been propelling the film. As it turns out, talking
about sex is a perfectly safe pursuit for an educated young woman in the world
of Where the Boys Are, but actually
doing it places her in mortal peril. Indeed, Where the Boys Are appears to endorse the view that bad girls who let men take liberties
forfeit both their dignity and the right to say no. It's a jarring turn in a
film that bills itself as a frothy romantic comedy, and the fact that no one in
1960 seems to have noticed the dissonance says as much about the era as the
script's squeaky clean language and chaste onscreen kisses. When it's not busy
clowning around, Where the Boys Are
plays less like an entertainment and more like an artifact of an ancient
civilization. It belongs in the Smithsonian. [Reuben’s rating: 6.7 out of 10]
Blogger’s
comment: I totally agree with the reviewer. I view Where the Boys Are as a time capsule of the social and sexual
mores, language, makeup, costumes and sets of 1959-60. There’s even a
one-second glimpse of a late 1950s Mercedes-Benz 300SL Gullwing coupe at the 47
minute mark of the film. And it was a treat to see George Hamilton, Jim Hutton
(father of actor Timothy Hutton), Paula Prentiss, Dolores Hart, and especially
Yvette Mimieux, who’s almost exactly six months older than I am, whom I’ve also
seen in The Time Machine (1960) and The Black Hole (1979) among other films,
and whom I remember as my major celebrity crush of 1960-61 – sixty years
ago.
Labels:
college, comedy, drama, Fifties, romance, Sixties
