Beach movies, summer and winter

Frankie and Annette did a few more traditional beach movies. Below are ads for Muscle Beach Party from the summer of '64, from Waterloo, Iowa and Akn, Ohio

Since it takes Hollywood a little time to capitalize on a surprise hit, 1965 was the year that the beach movies really saturated the market. Frankie and Annette were back together in Beach Blanket Bingo, which added the gimmick of skydiving. (Ads from Vancouver and Tucson, Arizona below, and note that the film was in wide release well before summer, at Easter in April of 1965)

Then Frankie and Annette split up, with Frankie doing a winter version of a beach movie, Ski Party.

Annette did her own non-beach beach movie, Pajama Party, opposite the ill-fated Tommy Kirk.

Another snowy beach movie was Winter A Go-Go with no big names, though James Stacy would go on to a long career despite losing an arm and a leg in a motorcycle accident.

The evolution of beach movies

Beach movies--that is, movies with teenagers on the beach, having fun, surfing, and falling in love--became a genre in the mid-60s but individual ones existed previously, at least as early as 1959's Gidget, shown in an ad for its San Francisco run in March of '59.

The trickle of such films became a wave in 1963 with the release of a B-movie from American International Pictures (AIP), Beach Party, with Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. The adults (Bob Cummings and Dorothy Malone) were top-billed, but it was Frankie and Annette who brought the kids in, and who kept the beach movies popular for a few years. Boys with muscles, girls in bikinis, surfboards and beers and disapproving parental figures were all part of the formula.  

Below is an ad from Mason City, Iowa (you didn't have to live near a coastal beach to vicariously enjoy the lifestyle) with the promise or a real beach party complete with Pepsi, limbo dancing, and swimsuits.
  

Meanwhile in Indianapolis, Beach Party was paired up with Erik the Conqueror, an Italian-made adventure from Mario Bava. I don't see the audiences for the two films syncing up, but maybe that's why they were put together, to get more folks into the theater.
 

A year later came the first Frankie and Annette sequel, Bikini Beach. And in my next post, the wave will continue.

 

First day of (Endless) Summer!

It seems appropriate to post, on this first day of summer, a classic summer movie, if more a cult item than a popcorn hit. Bruce Brown's Endless Summer opened in June of 1966. The documentary is about two surfers and their trek to experience an "endless summer" by jetting the globe and surfing wherever they can. The two visit (moving eastward from the United States) Senegal, Ghana, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.

Though I was only 10 when this movie came out, I remember feeling faint stirrings of sexual attraction when saw the ubiquitous ad image of the shirtless surfer on the beach in silhouette against a blazing sun. This image is striking, especially in color, and I couldn't find any other ads that featured any substantially different artwork. I didn't catch up with the movie until a few years ago. The photography is lovely, but the two surfers are not the most interesting subjects, and time has not been kind to the film's patronizing views of women and native peoples.Still, that ad pose will always mean summer to me.

Columbus movies, Mid-June 1959

A random selection of movie ads from 60 years ago this week in Columbus. First up, The Mysterians, a Japanese sci-fi film, made in 1957, released here in '59. Great title for a not-so-great film. Aliens want to breed with earth women (in the English dub, they say they want to "marry" them). Both are pre-release ads from the week of June 7. It was playing downtown at the Loew's Broad, a theater that closed in 1961. Notice the "cool" advective which referred to the air conditioning, not how hip the theater was.

Next, from on June 17, Watusi (1959) with George Montgomery, one of my favorite B-movie he-men. This King Solomon's Mines sequel played out like a Tarzan movie without a Tarzan figure. Not bad.

Finally, some random movies playing in Columbus in June 1959. Great triple feature of monster movies--I wonder if the King Kong prints had been restored by that time, with the gory scenes of Kong savagery that had been cut in previous reissues.

Summer at Party Beach

Two ads for one of my favorite bad horror films (and favorite bad summer films), The Horror of Party Beach (1964).  I didn't see this film until I was in college in the 70s but I bought a photo comic book of it in '65 when I was 9, and it looked like a really cool, gory movie. Also, I must admit, some of the photos of young men on the beach in tight trunks fueled some of my adolescent fantasies. The movie was quite disappointing, but it made for a fun MST3K episode.

The first ad above is from a Tucson paper; the second and third are from a Dayton paper, and it looks like some whiteout and ink was applied to extend the young lady's bikini.

Summer in the fall

An iconic summer movie with a popular theme song, A Summer Place (1959) didn't open until fall--October in New York, November in the rest of the country. Above is the New York City ad announcing its imminent arrival (10/16) followed by a classier ad for its Radio City Music Hall premiere run (10/21).

X-rated summer

If I remember to do so, I intend to post lots of summer movie ads here for the duration of the season. I'll feature two kinds of summer movies: 1) those about or set in the summer (though may not have been released in a summer month--following the same Hollywood logic that had the Christmas classic Miracle on 34th Street originally released in June); 2) those released in or the near the summer--they may not have seasonal content, but I associate them with summer, like Star Wars or the Indiana Jones movies.

First up is Last Summer, a menage-a trois coming-of age melodrama which was both set in and released in summertime. On its initial release, it was rated X (mostly for a brutal sexual assault scene, though it was later trimmed slightly for an R). What follows are: a full color ad for the R version, a New York City ad for its premiere engagement in June, and an for its first-run wide showing (at Christmastime, no less) in Des Moines, Iowa. I tried to find an ad that didn't center on beach breasts, but no luck.

St. Francis' moment in the sun

Brother Sun, Sister Moon, playing in Columbus in June of 1973. The story of St. Francis of Assisi presented with a bit of a flower child vibe (the score is by Donovan), but not overpoweringly so, Not a bad movie. Below is a full-color poster with a shot of Graham Faulkner's nude scene.

Movies on D-Day, part 4

Here's another batch of ads for movies playing across the country on or about D-Day, June 6, 1944: In Shreveport, Louisiana, Erich von Strohiem starred in the B-horror picture The Lady and the Monster, based on the novel Donovan's Brain. It was remade more famously under the novel's title in 1953 with Lew Ayres and Nancy Reagan (known then as Nancy Davis); Uncertain Glory, a wartime thriller, was playing in Tucson, Arizona.
 

 

Waterloo, Iowa had a reissue of Disney's Snow White--oddly paired with a Nazi melodrama, The Yellow Canary.

The appropriately celebratory military musical This is the Army by Irving Berlin was in Provo, Utah, along with what seems to be a lost B-comedy, The Good Fellows.

Move movies playing on D-Day

More movies playing during D-Day week. In Honolulu, a good old-fashioned double feature of The Strange Case of Doctor RX (marketed as a horror movie, but really a crime mystery) and B-western Pride of the Plains with Bob Livingston (who took over from John Wayne the role of Stony Brooke in the Three Mesquiteers movies).

In Los Angeles, The Eve of St. Mark, a war movie which seems to have gone missing in action, and Between Two Worlds, a remake of the 1930 supernatural film Outward Bound; an afterlife movie, a genre which, along with angel movies, really picked up in the post-war years.


In Billings, Montana, the colorful Maria Montez fantasy Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and some B-film double features, including one all-Spanish bill.

In Minneapolis, the war film None Shall Escape and Gaslight, followed by a Gaslight ad from Boston (a little classier than the Midwest got)
 

D-Day week in Ohio

Playing the week of June 6, 1944 in Ohio: Betty Grable in Pin-Up Girl ("Some zing for the boys!") was in Cincinnati.

Dayton had a B-movie double feature: The Lady and the Monster with Erich von Stroheim and the Sherlock Holmes film The Scarlet Claw (set in Canada).

Dayton also had the "adult" crowd covered with Sins of Bali ("Wild virgins see men for the first time!"). This was actually a 1932 movie originally called Virgins of Bali. According to the New York Times review, it's basically a travelogue/documentary that follows a native couple courting and marrying.

The second feature is She-Devil Island, apparently some folderol about men invading an all-female island--it seems to be a lost movie but a fabulous original poster for it follows.

Playing on D-Day in New York City

For the 75th anniversary of D-Day, I'll be posting some ads for movies playing in theaters that week. Today it's New York City with ads from the New York Times. Below is an ad for RKO theaters. Passage to Marseille (with Bogart and some Devil's Island escapees fighting Nazis) and Buffalo Bill with Joel McCrea. Both had musical second features. Note the newsreel featurette "Eve of Invasion" playing with the movies.

Radio City Music Hall was showing The White Cliffs of Dover, with a plotline that encompasses both World Wars, accompanied by a "spectacular" live revue. At the Rivoli was Cecil B. DeMille's The Story of Dr. Wassell about a real-life war hero; the New York Times review says, "Imagine a De Mille war picture in New York on D-day!" Note the reference to the "latest invasion news broadcast from stage"--in a pre-TV, pre-Internet world, there was only radio, newsreels, and these live updates to keep up with the invasion.

Tender Comrade, a teary wartime melodrama with Ginger Rogers, was at the Capitol, with an "all-girl orchestra" providing live entertainment. I'm not sure when live acts quit appearing at movie theaters, but clearly they were still an attraction during the war.

Not all the movies were war-related; also playing first-run were Mr. Skeffington and Make Your Own Bed, and a second-run of Lady in the Dark.