Cinema: Surf Boredom

Gidget Goes to Rome. A gidget is very much like a tammy. She is a blonde and nubile teen-ager who is as wholesome as a popsicle and quite innocent of cost fan tutte. Only one girl in the whole world may officially style herself Gidget at any given time, and the current incumbent is chirpily brazen, healthily sneaker-shod Cindy Carol, late of North Hollywood High.

One day while idly surfboarding at Malibu, Gidget and her girl friends get to talking about a trip to Rome. But go to Rome without boys? A girl would as soon go dateless to a drive-in. So Gidget gets Moondoggie, her beach-bum boy friend, to line up a couple of blind dates for her chums. Quicker than one can say Alitalia the adolescent sextet is scampering down the Spanish Steps, posing for gag snapshots in front of St. Peter’s, twisting in the Baths of Caracalla. “Pinch me,” says Gidget. Someone does, and she knows she is really, truly in the Eternal City.

James Darren, as the exquisitely manicured, coiffed, plucked and dentured Moondoggie, is on his third time out with the hyperthyroid little heroine (previous Gidgets: Sandra Dee, Deborah Walley). He seems doomed to traipse after gidgets until the apotheosis of the theme, which will doubtless be called Gidget Meets Tammy.

Beach Party is an anthropological documentary with songs. Robert Cummings, in ambush behind a wind-Schwepped beard, is gathering material for a book on teen-age sex play. Just outside his window at Balboa Beach, the puberty rites and other coming-of-age-in-California shenanigans of a tribe of overripe adolescents are in full cry, and Cummings’ telescope and electronic eavesdropping rig provide him with an eye-opening earful.

The beach resembles Seal Rock in mating season. Frankie Avalon, with his pack of gold-necklaced surf jockeys, and Annette Funicello, with her bevy of busty beach bunnies are—in the words of one of their tribal hymns—”just asurfin’ all day and swingin’ all night.” But danger lurks in the dunes: a marauding band of post-Brando wild ones roars up on a midnight raid. Quinquagenarian Cummings, with precious little help from Frankie, sends them yelping off with their motorcycles tucked between their legs.

The climax of this primitive business is a custard-pie war in a beatnik beer and poetry parlor. Pie-facing, like pratfalling, seems to be a lost art nowadays, and Avalon desecrates the memory of Deadpan Harry Langdon: he stands there and actually squinches up his eyes before the strawberry cream splatters all over his pretty face. Nonetheless, Annette goes ape for Frankie, crooning “I was such a fool/ To treat him so crool.”

As a study of primitive behavior patterns, Beach Party is more unoriginal than aboriginal. In comparison, it makes Gidget’s Roman misadventures look like a scene from Tosca.