"Beach Party" from 1963 is sometimes credited with creating its own short-lived film genre, the "beach party" genre of the mid-sixties sixties, although the same elements- sun, sea, sand, surfing, sexy girls in bikinis, hunks in trunks and pop music- could be found in earlier American films such as "Gidget" from 1959 and "Where the Boys Are" from 1960. This last, however, was not a "pure" comedy like the typical beach party movie, but a rather uneasy mixture of comedy and more serious themes. "Beach Party", however, was such a success that it was followed up several more beach party films from the same studio, American International Pictures.
Like all the AIP beach party films, this one deals with a group of teenagers holidaying on the beaches of Southern California. An eccentric academic, Professor Robert Sutwell, is also visiting the beach with the aim of making an anthropological study of the teenage surfing sub-culture, which reminds him of primitive tribes. As with many of these films, the leading roles are taken by Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, who play boyfriend and girlfriend Frankie and Dolores. Complications arise when Dolores develops a crush on the nutty Professor and Frankie starts paying attentions to a Hungarian waitress named Ava. A further complication is provided by the local biker gang and their leader Eric Von Zipper (probably intended as a parody of Marlon Brando's character in "The Wild One").
The decline of the "beach party" genre can be attributed to the fact that it fell on the wrong side of the great cultural divide between the not-quite-permissive early sixties and the more genuinely permissive second half of the decade. There is a vague assumption that the boys and girls who flock to the beaches are all making wild passionate love, but nothing is ever made explicit, as the Production Code was still officially in force in 1963. The girls all wear bikinis of a design which probably seemed quite daring at the time but which only a few years later their mothers would have been quite happy to be seen wearing, and the boys are all prime specimens of the "sun-tanned, crew-cut, All-American male" (to quote a line from "Beach Baby", a British pop song from the seventies which seemed to hark back to the spirit of the AIP films).
Nothing encapsulates way in which society was about to change better than the film's attitude towards facial hair. The Professor is constantly mocked ("old pig-bristles!") for the fact that he sports a beard, something which strikes the other characters as not only unfashionable but also ridiculous. The other male characters are clean-shaven to a man, with not a single beard, or even a well-trimmed moustache, to be seen among them. I suppose in '63 this might just have been credible but by '67 or '68 there would have been plenty of hirsute, bearded youngsters to be seen.
The plot is pretty feeble, but that is perhaps not a serious criticism of the film as I doubt if anyone ever went to a breach party movie expecting a strikingly original plot or intellectual writing. The music, however, is also dull and forgettable, and the acting is below par even by teen movie standards. The best-known cast member of Vincent Price, but his is the briefest cameo imaginable. The best contribution comes from Bob Cummings, who succeeds in making the Professor strangely loveable as well as eccentric, but I just couldn't see what the attraction was of either of the two leads. Avalon, regarded as something of a heart-throb at the time, was good-looking, but here comes across as rather unlikeable and unsympathetic. As for Funicello, she came across as such a milk-and-water goody-two-shoes that it seems incredible that she was ever considered a sex-symbol, except perhaps the sort of thoroughly wholesome and respectable sex-symbol whom parents think their sons ought to like but whom the sons themselves find a bit boring. (It came as no surprise to learn that she made her name on Disney's Mickey Mouse Club).
The film was clearly aimed at a teen audience but what strikes us today is how dated it looks, far more than do most films of the era aimed at adults (or, for that matter, those aimed at younger children). Teenage sub-cultures seem to age particularly badly. Not only does the film look outdated by the standards of 2018, it would have looked almost equally outdated by the standards of my own teenage years in the seventies and eighties. Indeed, the last entries in the AIP series were probably starting to look like relics of the past even when they were released in 1966 and 1967. 4/10
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