Lament for the California Beach Movie

April 2011: Writer Terrance Rafferty has written a history and lament for the "Beach Party" movies of the 1960s, with some dead-on descriptions and mixed affection for what was once such a popular genre in American celluloid. Titled Oh, Kahuna, What Became of That Endless Summer?, the essay questions what caused the death of the genre, and where it is now, surviving in documentaries.

"By 1963, when “Catch a Wave” was recorded, the image of California as a paradise of leisure, especially for the young, had reached a kind of peak. Or perhaps a nadir, because that was the very year in which American International Pictures, an independent studio that specialized in low-budget exploitation fare for drive-ins, kicked off a series of California beach-party movies starring Frankie Avalon, a second-tier teen idol from South Philadelphia, and Annette Funicello, a buxom young songstress who had made her pop-culture bones as the cutest, perkiest cast member of “The Mickey Mouse Club.” The first of these films, directed by William Asher and called, imaginatively, “Beach Party,” featured a handful of terrible songs, some excruciatingly broad comedy (mostly supplied by veteran television comics like Robert Cummings, Morey Amsterdam and Harvey Lembeck) and a few truly risible surfing sequences, in which Frankie and his pals grin and bob in close-up in front of rear-projected waves.

It was awful... "

Original page 2002 | Updated Jan 2014

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