Where the Boys Are
Speaking of weird psychotic melodramas, check out Where the Boys Are. It's a proto-Beach Party movie made in 1960 (so, 3 years before the Frankie and Annettes), and damn, they should have called it, Before Beach Party Movies Were Entertaining. It's a total waste of space! And my hopes were so high... Instead of a fun story about highjinx at Fort Lauderdale, we get this tedious, depressing little morality tale about abstinence. And of all the things they DIDN'T leave out from the beach party movies, they decided to keep the tackiness (without the enjoyability) and the horrible, pointless dialogue, and they even threw in a few sub-rate musical numbers. Damn.
Bill Maher, the guest programmer on TCM, picked this movie as one of his favorites. Crazy fuck. He actually liked the Code-era touches, which makes him psychotic too. In one of the subplots, a naive girl meets two Yalies; we had learned earlier that it was her dream to meet an Ivy Leaguer and marry him. One of the Yalies, Dill, wins the coin toss, so she starts going out with him. It's unclear if she puts out. But Dill has to leave town for a few days, and in the meantime the naive girl gets seduced by the other Yalie, Franklin. She gets drunk one night and definitely puts out. Then she starts talking to Franklin about marriage. Franklin stops returning her calls. She gets sad and desperate, and calls him up, begging for a date, when he's partying with his guy friends. He tells her to wait for him in this motel...
and when the door is finally knocking, Dill is standing there. The girl starts crying and screaming no, but Dill basically rapes her anyways. Post-coitus, the girl tries to off herself. She's wandering around the highway, gets hit by a car, and is rescued just on time by her friends. In her hospital bed, she cries that they should have let her die. End of subplot.
The Hayes Codes stipulated that any illicit sex act has to go punished in movies. I suppose the girl had it coming to her; she got gang raped, so she deserved to be hit by a car. Just in case it wasn't punishment enough that she'd be a pariah for the rest of her life.
Bill Maher, the guest programmer on TCM, picked this movie as one of his favorites. Crazy fuck. He actually liked the Code-era touches, which makes him psychotic too. In one of the subplots, a naive girl meets two Yalies; we had learned earlier that it was her dream to meet an Ivy Leaguer and marry him. One of the Yalies, Dill, wins the coin toss, so she starts going out with him. It's unclear if she puts out. But Dill has to leave town for a few days, and in the meantime the naive girl gets seduced by the other Yalie, Franklin. She gets drunk one night and definitely puts out. Then she starts talking to Franklin about marriage. Franklin stops returning her calls. She gets sad and desperate, and calls him up, begging for a date, when he's partying with his guy friends. He tells her to wait for him in this motel...
and when the door is finally knocking, Dill is standing there. The girl starts crying and screaming no, but Dill basically rapes her anyways. Post-coitus, the girl tries to off herself. She's wandering around the highway, gets hit by a car, and is rescued just on time by her friends. In her hospital bed, she cries that they should have let her die. End of subplot.
The Hayes Codes stipulated that any illicit sex act has to go punished in movies. I suppose the girl had it coming to her; she got gang raped, so she deserved to be hit by a car. Just in case it wasn't punishment enough that she'd be a pariah for the rest of her life.
posted by Rex at 1:44 AM
2 Comments:
Dude, that movie sounds like a mess! Bill Maher sounds like a creep! Why didn't the two dudes get hit by cars? They're the ones who seduced/raped the girl. Jesus.
I know, that's what I'm saying! Waste of space! And not only is Bill Maher a creep, he admitted to trying out one of this pick up lines from this movie on a girl at school...so he's pathetic too.
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