My Romance with Movies: From the 1960s: Where the Boys Are

1960 Romance Comedy Drama

From MGM

Directed by Henry Levin

Starring

Dolores Hart

George Hamilton

Yvette Mimieux

Jim Hutton

Paula Prentiss

Connie Francis

Barbara Nichols

Frank Gorshin

Chill Wills

Rory Harrity

John Brennan

I think I have spring fever. I noticed the kids around here on their spring break and it got me to thinking about some of my favorite times enjoying myself away from school. For three consecutive years I use to spend spring breaks in Newport Beach and Balboa Island, two neighboring Southern California cities. A friend's wealthy mother usually rented a place for us while neither she nor any other adults were in attendance... if one doesn't count occasional visits from the police.

Before long I was thinking of this movie... the ultimate spring break flick as I see it. Where the Boys Are is a nostalgic piece of entertainment about great gatherings of horny, beer-guzzling teenagers and young adults who spend their time looking for more beer and getting laid. Really, you haven't lived until you wake up to find more strangers than you can count sleeping on furniture, floors and in bathtubs.

Producer Joe Pasternak was a prolific MGM producer who loved these youth-oriented movies and knew there was a great market for them. In the late fifties and early-to-mid sixties, there were lots of them. Elvis certainly contributed his share. Most of all them were not good films but the under age 21 folks didn't care. Warner Bros understood the promise of youth-oriented films and hired Sandra Dee, Troy Donahue, Connie Stevens and others to help haul in the teenage dollars.

Pasternak hired Henry Levin to direct because he shared Pasternak's viewpoint on the youth market. Levin had made and would continue to make such films. It's odd, however, that this film is their only collaboration.

Hart & Hamilton

They lined up this youthful (early 20s) cast. This was Hart's sixth film. It was the third for Mimieux, the fourth for Hamilton and Hutton and the film debuts of Prentiss and Francis. The latter, under contract to MGM to make records, was arguably the most famous of the bunch because she was a wildly popular international singing star... in several languages.

The picture opens with a colorful, aerial view of the beaches of Ft. Lauderdale. The narrator declares... For 50 weeks of the year, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida is a small corner of a tropical heaven basking contentedly in the warm sun. During the other two weeks, when colleges all over the country disgorge their students for Easter vacation, a change comes over the scene. The students swarm to the peaceful shores in droves... 20,000 strong. They turn night into day and a small corner of heaven into a sizable chunk of bedlam. The boys come to soak up the sun and a few cases of beer. And the girls come, very simply, because this is where the boys are.

Cue the song. Oddly enough it is not Francis's top-selling hit in the U.S. but it would become her most famous, her signature song. And it would rise to #1 in 15 or so foreign countries. If she'd done a concert without including Where the Boys Are, there might have been a riot.

Mimieux & Garrity

The four female friends leave blizzard conditions in Ohio to spend their spring break in the Sunshine State. Hart is Merritt, the high-IQed lady of the group, who got in hot water in college espousing pre-marital sex but is wary of taking the plunge herself. Tuggle (Prentiss) is also uptight about doing the deed but she is desperate to get married. Like the others, Melanie (Mimieux) is a virgin when she arrives in Florida but soon she is looking for love and sex with all those handsome men in apartment 5. Her story will be the darkest. Angie (Francis) is the least developed character of the four but she is good with the songs.

Hamilton plays Ryder in his senior year at Brown whose wealthy family owns the yacht that he and Merritt spend so much time on. She's impressed when he phones the butler from the boat to order dinner which comes on a silver platter. In his gentlemanly way Hamilton attempts to melt her down but it's a no-go.

Tuggle gets involved with TV (Hutton) whom the girls pick up on the road. Tuggle is tall and TV is taller and she is immediately smitten despite the fact that all he talks about is sex and all she wants to talk about is marriage, seemingly oblivious to the fact they have just met.

Angie comes across Basil (Gorshin), who leads a jazz combo, and falls instantly in love. Their rather silly relationship is strictly for restrained giggles.

Gorshin & Francis

The funniest moment comes when all but Mimieux are watching Lola Fandango (Nichols) who has an underwater act in a nightclub. TV is agog over her lungs and soon is seen diving into the water. Eventually all his buddies end up there, too, although the intention was to reach down and pull him out. They all wind up in front of police chief Chill Wills.

The film's dramatic moment comes when Melanie is date-raped at a hotel from one of the guys in apartment 5. She manages to call Merritt who arrives at the motel with Ryder and Tuggle to find a disoriented and disheveled Melanie wandering down a busy highway. She is barely hit by a car as Ryder grabs her and they go tumbling down an embankment. In the hospital, a tear-stained Melanie regrets her foolish behavior and wants to go home to her parents. Merritt and Ryder will drive her there.

By the finale spring break comes to an end. The relationships of the three couples look to be working out for that sequel that never came.

I'm not sure we need to highlight the acting... not that it wasn't perfectly satisfactory but because films about teens don't seem to require it. I did, however, think that Hart was briefly a fine actress.

Prentiss & Hutton

The producers were quite happy with the work of Prentiss and Hutton and were happier still that the public wanted to see them do more together. Their next three films were The Honeymoon Machine, Bachelor in Paradise and The Horizontal Lieutenant. None was as successful as Where the Boys Are.

Mimieux was not only in the aforementioned Light in the Piazza but so was Hamilton, this time as her boyfriend. Hamilton thought little of Boys and was sure it was a mistake to make it (he had little if any choice). He originally called it a little nothing of a film but came to realize it had became a cult and camp classic.

I expect much of the credit for the success had to do with the resident songbird. Francis was anxious to do the film... she wanted to test the waters and see what she had to offer as an actress. The answer would come back as not a whole lot. The studio certainly saw little potential or it would have given her better films. Instead she played the same type of role in only three more films... two of which have boys in the title. You see how this was working out. She probably did too.

In Follow the Boys (1963) Francis again costarred with Prentiss, Looking for Love (1964) she costarred with Hutton (with Prentiss, Hamilton and Mimieux in cameos as themselves) and the last was When the Boys Meet the Girls (1965). When I say much of Boys credit goes to the singer, it's without a doubt because of that title tune. It would hardly be the only time when a song raised the visibility of a movie.

How interesting that of the seven youthful leads in a film made 62 years ago four of them are still alive. Mimieux just passed away and Gorshin died in 2005 while Hutton died in 1979.

I'm also somewhat intrigued by the fact that none of them went on to have starring careers in the movies. Hart, of course, three years later became a nun. Francis made those three so-so films trying unsuccessfully to capture the magic of this film. Prentiss became ill and channeled her success into her family. Gorshin was never a big movie performer. Hamilton, well, he's been around forever... hopefully still handsome and fun but far more a personality, albeit a tanned one, than a movie star. Mimieux, who stayed away from the teenage stuff, made a couple of good films but by and large her big screen career was rather lackluster.

Where the Boys Are is based on a novel by Glendon Swarthout. His teenage novel attracted the attention of MGM because of the darkness of the character played by Mimieux which, in turn, had to be toned down some if they wanted teens to be able to see it. Some of Swarthout's other novels that became films are They Came to Cordura, Bless the Beasts and Children and The Shootist.

I did not know this before doing the research for this piece that there was no spring break with thousands of invading teens in Ft. Lauderdale before this film.

They shared a warm friendship while filming

I found American Humanities professor Camille Paglia's praise for the film's accurate depiction of courtship and sexuality worth noting here:

The theatrics of public outrage over date rape are (feminists') ways of restoring the old sexual rules that were shattered by my generation. Because nothing about the sexes has really changed. The comic film Where the Boys Are, the ultimate expression of 50s man-chasing, still speaks directly to our time. It shows smart, lively women skillfully anticipating and fending off the dozens of strategies with which horny men try to get them in bed. The agonizing date rape subplot and climax are brilliantly done. The victim, Yvette Mimieux, makes mistake after mistake, obvious to the other girls. She allows herself to be lured away from her girlfriends and into isolation with boys whose character and intentions she misreads. Where the Boys Are tells the truth. It shows courtship as a dangerous game in which the signals are not verbal but subliminal.

I am not sure whether I would have thought of including this film here but then came that spring fever. I always enjoyed the film... found it entertaining and fun and with something to say. Wasn't it the granddaddy of the beach movies but oh so much better? Of course it ends as it began... with that song.

I decided to forego the usual trailer and show instead the final scene which always touches my heart.