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Gary Morris’s essay “Beyond the Beach” is a very
good study of the entire “Beach” series from American International
Pictures, one of the most famous independent, “B” movie studios to
emerge in the fifties. They specialized in exploitation pictures in that
era: some juvee delinquent pix, some crime drama, some horror and sci
fi as well. Anything to bring the teen market they wanted.
But
as Morris points out, AIP was looking for a little more legitimacy, a
little more respectability (as long as profits were not hurt, anyway). Hence the series of adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories usually featuring Vincent Price (The Fall of the House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, etc.). This also led to efforts to make “clean teen” pictures, of which Beach Party is the first. Instead of monsters and gangs, it was just “normal, healthy kids” having fun on the beach. These
kids lived in a very idyllic world: in the transition from high school
to college, with no income troubles, and no fear of nuclear holocaust
(or the draft), they could indulge in the pleasures of surfing all day
and swinging all night.
The narratives focus on pretty much the same thing: boys chasing girls. Yes,
sometimes there are outside threats to their paradise, but they are
clearly comical threats like the motorcycle gang led by Erich Von
Zipper. Racial tensions? Forget it. Just like
in most of the fifties movies, there are no people of color on the
beach, except for the occasional Motown performer like Stevie Wonder or
the Supremes. Violence? Nothing serious – these are “good teens” who
will have no trouble carrying on their function in a postwar
consumer-driven economy. The plots themselves are not all that important
to the overall themes of “good times.” Indeed, as Morris notes, the films themselves are rather chaotic on a formal level (see 9-10). Stock
footage of surfers, recycled images from earlier entries in the series
appearing in later ones, and so on, frequently threaten to tear the
narratives to shreds. Yet no one pays attention to the “messiness” – the
films even flaunt their own incoherence at times, having characters
directly address the camera/audience. (Frankie Avalon does this at least
once in Beach Party). Just because the films
participate in a minor act or two of deconstruction does not assure
viewers of a critical perspective on the apparatus of the movie industry
(or of capitalism, as several of the French New Wave film makers of
this period wanted to believe). In that respect they are more like the musicals of a generation before than at first glance.
In Beach Party,
the use of the explorer/anthropologist Robert Sutwell provides a
representation of the outsider perspective, but of course that
perspective is completely mocked and ridiculed. He is seen as a voyeur
as much as he is a scientist. And his
participant-encounters with the teens suggest some rather questionable
anthropological methods. (I’m discussing this partly to remind you of
Doherty’s arguments regarding the attitude that filmmakers had
concerning teens: as you recall, some films clearly took an outsider
position while others were more sympathetic to the kids.) But eventually
he comes around to accept them from their point of view, even as he
prepares to move on to his next project, apparently having learned a few
pointers about romance/sex from the teens!
As
for the music, the beach movies often had some decent pop and rock acts
that often provided more entertainment than the plots. Beach Party features the King of the Surf Guitar, Dick Dale, and his group, the Del-Tones. If
you’ve never surfed before, Dale’s music is about the closest thing to
what it sounds like without actually being on the waves. You don’t
really get a sense of that in this film, but his guitar work here is
pretty impressive. Some of the other songs are moderately interesting pre-Beatles sixties pop. “ Treat Him Nicely” was a pretty sizable hit for Annette Funicello, who was, as you may know, a former Mouseketeer. (In
fact, she was still under contract to Disney and was asked not to wear
too revealing a bathing suit when she appeared in this film. Eventually, she got with the program and wore bikinis like the other girls.)
AIP made several beach movies but also a few variants, like Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine,
which stars Avalon as a junior spy who stumbles upon a plot of the
aforementioned Doctor (played by Vincent Price, of course) to rob millions by creating female robots who
marry and kill wealthy young sons of millionaires. The film is not set
at the beach but in San Francisco, and there are no musical sequences
with guest stars (though there are two amusing cameos in the film). It was one of the last movies AIP made with Avalon, and represents a drying up of the old formula. (But man, I love the title song, sung by the Supremes and almost impossible to find!)
And here's the trailer. Surf's up.
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