Beach Blanket Bingo (USA, 1965) 98 min color DIR: William Asher. PROD: Samuel Z. Arkoff, James H. Nicholson. SCR: Leo Townsend, William Asher. MUSIC: Les Baxter. DOP: Floyd Crosby. CAST: Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello, Harvey Lembeck, John Ashley, Deborah Walley, Jody McCrea, Marta Kristen, Linda Evans, Don Rickles, Paul Lynde, Donna Loren, Timothy Carey, Buster Keaton, Bobbi Shaw. (American International Pictures)
It has been said that a genre is officially over once the spoofs come out. While it may be redundant to coin this movie as a spoof of the “beach party” genre (which is itself a spoof), truthfully no other word applies. Beach Blanket Bingo is a very broad send-up of its own ilk, and played out to the most surreal of degrees. Call it Hellzapoppin’ with a beach towel- this is the most cartoonish of an already cartoonish genre. And it may be the busiest. Imagine if Frank Tashlin and Robert Altman dropped some quaaludes and slummed for AIP in the mid-60s, you would get a hint of the fast whimsy offered in this larger-than-life, way-out trip through nostalgia.
One could say that Beach Blanket Bingo belongs to that short list of films like Casablanca or Rocky Horror, where (to coin a phrase from J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum) it is “not one movie, but every movie”. The most conventional thing in the movie is the love rectangle, where Frankie and Annette (whose name is Dee Dee this time), fight, flirt with other people, and safely reconcile before anyone does the Mogambo. (The other half of the love rectangle is Steve and Bonnie, a warring couple who run a flight school- played by then-real life couple John Ashley and Deborah Walley). Other than that, we have Bonehead (Jody McCrea, also of The Glory Stompers) falling in love with a mermaid (whatever happened to Marta Kristen?), Eric Von Zipper (Harvey Lembeck) and his Brando-wannabe bike gang seeing fit to rescue singing sensation Sugar Kane (Linda Evans!) from those horrible teenagers on the beach, Buster Keaton fishing and chasing any woman who walks past him, a nod to Perils of Pauline as someone literally gets sawed in half, and a Keystone Kops-style chase finale, filmed in silent-movie speed. Whew!
If anything, Beach Blanket Bingo is a paean to the innocence of youth. It is preserving the joys of life before one crosses the threshold to adulthood and disillusionment. It is an eternal playground where there’s always music, laughter, and fun, where even the most loathsome characters remain likeable (Timothy Carey’s included). It is an eternal summer where love is on high and the sun never sets (sometimes quite literally in its day-for-night scenes). If the sole purposes of a movie were simply to capture joy and preserve a space and time, then Beach Blanket Bingo succeeds threefold.
Not only is this the ultimate beach party movie, it is also one of the crown achievements of American International Pictures, who basically cornered the drive-in market. Perhaps the very reason for its success is all the ingredients crammed into it. In essence, the film is a beach party movie only in setting. Other than that, it is a sly history of American cinema crammed into 90 minutes, tackling cliches of biker movies, fantasy realms (especially Night Tide, which wasn’t too far back in the drive-in crowd’s conscious), “boy meets girl” musicals, silent film, and aviation pictures.
Perhaps Samuel Arkoff and James Nicholson were realizing the limitations of the beach pictures, and needed to fill them with as many flourishes as they could. Less successfully, they had already made Pajama Party, where the cast meets Tommy Kirk as a Martian (not to rival his work to come in Mars Needs Women!). After the success of Bingo, they tried to meld the beach genre with more interesting artifacts of pop culture- alas, with dismal results (How to Stuff a Wild Bikini and Ghost in the Invisible Bikini, which even Frankie and Annette turned down!).
Originally published in Vol. #1, Issue #2 “The First Annual Summer Drive-In Issue”.
Greg Woods
Greg Woods has been a film enthusiast since his teens, and began his writing "career" at the same time- prolific in capsule reviews of everything he had watched, first on index cards, then those hardcover dollar store black journals, then an old Mac IIsi. He founded The Eclectic Screening Room in 2001, as a portal to share his film love with the world, and find some like-minded enthusiasts along the way. In addition to having worked in the film industry for over two decades, he has been a co-programmer of films at Trash Palace, and a programmer/co-founder of the Toronto Film Noir Syndicate. He has also written for Broken Pencil, CU-Confidential, Micro-Film, and is currently working on his first novel. His secret desire is for someone to interview him for a podcast or a DVD extra.