Stranded at the Drive-In

by Garry Mulholland

  It’s a brave, sophisticated piece of writing which would have been as good if not better than a Rebel . . . or The 400 Blows (see here) if it had been directed with their iconoclastic flair. As it is – and probably to make sure it got through the layers of censorship and media watchdog-ery as much as anything else – it looks and sounds like a dodgy Elvis movie, all fluffy holiday colour, corny music and lack of cutting edges that might hurt a child when handled incorrectly. But, again, that is what makes Where The Boys Are more genuinely subversive than the auteur classics I mention.

  The presentation of a liberal paradise for kids is entirely connected to what would have made the film entertaining for teens of the time. The movie is full of the seaside shenanigans that kids find amusing and adults find annoying (it occasionally resembles a template for 50 per cent of MTV’s future programming) with every adult bullied by sheer weight of numbers. But, most of all – parents are absent. Every kid travels alone or with their friends and temporarily gets to ‘play house’ in a more wholesome way than Merritt is alluding to. This also makes for another unusual element that differentiates most teen films of any era from Where The Boys Are – nothing that happens here is the fault of the parents. They aren’t just absent from Fort Lauderdale, but from the picture. So the good and bad decisions of our heroines are their own, and nothing is blamed on Bad Dads or Moms. These are late teens who are preparing for adult life and are not presented as victims of their childhoods. This must have been a refreshing change for kids who were at the cinema precisely to escape their parents. But it also suggests that, by the time we’re old enough to think about sex, we’re also old enough to make decisions about it that aren’t based on whether Mom is a shrew or Dad is a bully. And that not everyone doing things that the older generation disapproved of was doing those things for that reason primarily. The movie gives kids a tantalising glimpse of what it must be like to be free of parental control and able to make independent decisions, while accepting that totally fucking up those decisions from time to time is part of what being adult is.

  There is also an interestingly cynical view of love – or, at least, the word ‘love’. In one scene, Merritt points out that Melanie is insisting that she’s in love with one boy when, just a few days previously, she was insisting she was in love with his friend. The thing the two boys have in common is that they’ve slept with her, and Melanie is obviously using the word as a justification for having gone from virgin to ho without passing Go. We cut to a scene where Merritt has dragged Melanie along on a trip on her man’s boat to save her from herself. As Merritt and her man talk, he remarks that he really ‘likes’ Merritt, and then pauses, adding that that was the first time he had ever said that to a girl. Merritt scoffs. ‘Oh . . . I’ve told plenty of girls I love them. But not like,’ he explains. The couple exchange a look and a smile. They both understand that, in the game of seduction, ‘like’ stands for respect and is worth a hundred ‘love’s, which is just a sexual justification for young men, too.

  So how else do these laydees learn and grow? The charismatic Paula Prentiss’s Tuggle fends off TV’s sexual advances until his eye roves towards older woman and comedy ‘mermaid dancer’ Lola Fandango, played by Barbara Nichols. Tug simply learns that a choice to remain celibate until marriage will probably chase away the kind of freewheeling maverick she seems to be attracted to. TV is so slippery that he confesses to being ‘tricky’ and ‘a fake’, and then bullies Tuggle with what becomes the movie’s most loaded question: ‘Are you a good girl?’

  It’s Tuggle (I know – I have no idea!) that gets the movie’s most notorious lines, when she declaims, ‘Girls like me weren’t built to be educated. We were made to have children. That’s my ambition – to be a walking, talking baby factory.’ Nice. But although Tuggle is a likeable character, the language of the willing victim of conservative values is so extreme you can almost hear the thousands of ingénue viewers shuddering with horror all the way from 1960. Even a girl who really doesn’t want to do anything except be a mother would not want to think of herself as a mindless breeding machine. Tuggle’s view of herself is a comment on her mother’s generation, and what conservatives wanted women to be. She eventually gets the guy without popping her cherry, but you suspect that she isn’t a willing baby factory any more.

  And actually, I said all four learn and grow, but that’s not true. Having been cast as the ‘ugly girl’, Connie Francis has the thankless role of comic relief. Angie cops off with ‘dialectic jazz’ bassist Basil, played by impressionist Frank Gorshin, whose famously googly eyes get lent an added air of slapstick laffs by a pair of fishbowl specs. He is a pretentious pseud – one of his post-Miles Davis excursions is called ‘A Meeting Between Shakespeare And Satchel Paige On Hampstead Heath’. Angie is, predictably, Basil’s last resort, at first. Then, at a gig, she – well, Connie Francis – transforms his shapeless jazz tune into a gospel-tinged pop hit. He ends up calling her ‘beautiful’ because he loses his glasses. There is no lesson learned. So, OK . . . it’s not all feminist subterfuge.

  Merritt pulls suave trainee lounge lizard Ryder, played by George Hamilton, who is so greasy here he leaves a trail of slime on the beach. He is rich, older – 22 – and woos 19-year-old Merritt in swanky cocktail bars rather than crowded student pubs. He can take her smartarse mocking and his IQ is even higher than hers, the equivalent (this is essentially the late ’50s, lest we forget) of TV having to be just that few inches taller than the 5 foot 10 inch Tuggle. Ryder even risks his neck to rescue the damsel in distress. He is every girl’s dream Spring Break catch . . . if you don’t mind following behind him with a mop and bucket.

  But the film takes its dark turn with Melanie. For her, sexual experience has not been a passport to maturity, but terror. It’s as if someone unplugged a pipe that was holding back a flood of insecurities. Those insecurities split her off from the safety of the group and take her into self-imposed isolation. She is raped by misogynist posh boy Dill in a motel, and appears to have been drugged. Except that there is no mention of drugs, any more than anyone says the word ‘rape’. Whichever way, her experience has made her a suicidal zombie, and she wanders into the middle of a busy road, almost dies, and does end up hospitalised. ‘I feel so old,’ she wails, mourning the end of her childhood and the slaying of her innocence.

  So the simple interpretation is that the only girl to lose her virginity is brutally punished for her ‘crime’, a fine tradition later taken up by the makers of teen slasher movies. But is it that simple? Or does Melanie suffer because she shows terrible judgement about men, pandering to their whims (she even starts smoking because her man does) because they are students from Yale and have high social status? Even this is a con, and the sinister nature of her eventual attacker is cleverly foreshadowed by Levin: while the other three male leads get plenty of quality screen-time and dialogue – we get to know them and therefore trust them – Melanie’s seducer Dill is constantly shot with his back to camera or in profile, as if hiding from us. In fact, the first time we meet him he has his back to us; he is with an even more anonymous jock mate, and they are flipping a coin. The script doesn’t have to make it clear that the pair are flipping for who gets to bed Melanie.

  So Melanie betrays the sisterhood by immediately bailing on her friends to chase after these guys – their holiday apartment is increasingly full of strange girls given a temporary home through female solidarity, yet Melanie is rarely present – and she betrays herself by doing what the guys want and not making independent decisions based upon her own desires . . . and, for that matter, refusing to listen to Merritt’s sisterly advice. One can interpret the morality tale by inferring that Melanie is raped for being too easy. But you could make an equally compelling case for inferring that Melanie is punished for being easily led, a social climber and a bad feminist . . . and as dumb as a box of rocks. Weirdly, the way Melanie behaves when she’s drunk is a very thinly veiled parody of Marilyn Monroe, and Melanie’s fate here feels like a prop
hecy of the star’s death two years later. There is something here about the insecure good-time gal as helpless victim of male power that has continued to resonate down the years.

  By contrast, smart, sensible and loyal Merritt is given an ending as clever as she deserves – an unresolved one. She agrees to a long-distance relationship with Ryder. She may meet up with him, and, if she does, she might sleep with him. But it will be her choice, and one that will depend entirely on her desires and whether she feels she is ready.

  The film does the biggest service to its viewers by not presenting an entirely happy ending at the expense of Melanie. Nothing that includes a sexual assault can end happily. Melanie’s experience has simply given Merritt food for thought, and therefore the girls in its audience the same food for thought about one of the most profound experiences that everyone on this planet faces. Or, as Merritt puts it, when Ryder calls her strong: ‘No girl is when it comes to love – or what she thinks is love. How do you know the difference?’ Notice careful use of the word ‘girl’, not woman. Where The Boys Are is not an attempt to stop girls growing up. It is a warning about not trying to grow up too soon. As potentially happy couple Merritt and Ryder step from the dark of the shade into the light of the ocean, Connie Francis’s theme tune swells and hits home the final point: ‘Where the boys are . . . someone waits for me.’ Consider any boys in the audience duly chastised.

  The female loss-of-virginity theme of Where The Boys Are has been played out in more recent quality teen movies, notably Grease (see here), Little Darlings (see here), But I’m A Cheerleader (see here) and Twilight (see here). Grease even rights the wronging of Melanie, and gives its sexually experienced woman Rizzo a happy ending of sorts. But none of these movies talks about the issues with as much honesty, wit and courage as Where The Boys Are, when taken in the context of how little film-makers could get away with when discussing adolescent sexuality in the 1950s. You’ve got to remember . . . the ’60s, as we think we know it, didn’t even begin until 1963.

  At times, Where The Boys Are feels like a public information film for young women injected with songs, gags, a plot and Hollywood production values. I hope that doesn’t put you off. Because, rape and plain girl storylines notwithstanding, it is more thoughtful and less glib about sex than any of the hundreds of cynical campus comedies that have come in its fifty-year wake. And, if it’s not the best teen movie of all time, it might just be the most prophetic about a woman’s right to choose.

  BEAT GIRL

  1960

  Starring: Gillian Hills, David Farrar, Noelle Adam, Christopher Lee, Adam Faith, Shirley Anne Field, Peter McEnery, Oliver Reed

  Dir.: Edmond T. Gréville

  Plot: The modern city eats its young.

  Key line: ‘Next week . . . VOOM! Up goes in the world in smoke. And what’s the score? Zero! So now, while it’s now, we live it up. Do everything. Feel everything. Strictly for kicks!’

  This incredibly strange cult movie is such a hotch-potch of great and awful film-making that it’s impossible to make sense of it all at first viewing. But the more you watch, the more richly rewarding Beat Girl becomes, existing as a relatively believable document of the British teen underground as it stood on the cusp of becoming the planet’s mainstream youth culture. Because, once you get past plot, main themes and acting that veers between the sublime and the utterly fucking useless, the film’s great pleasures lie in crazy scenes of gone teens in caves, cellars and other thrillingly sleazy places.

  There’s the bit where you suddenly see a junkie playing drums. Except he’s not actually a junkie, but a boy called Pinky Ross who is trying to break the world drumming record, which currently stands, according to Beat Girl, at 57 hours, 22 minutes and 14 seconds. He is close to collapse, haphazardly thumping a tom-tom as a rock ’n’ roll tune thunders on, ignoring him. The kids in the café ignore him too, apart from one pretty blonde girl in regulation tomboy drag, who watches him dreamily while distractedly sucking on an ice lolly. Finally, Pinky just keels over, face-first, onto his drum kit. She rolls her eyes. ‘Oh well – not this time,’ she sighs, with an air of futility, and minces away up the stairs, leaving Pinky to face his percussion pains alone.

  There’s the bit where a black stripper called Pascaline does a proto-rap-video-ho routine in a Soho sex joint, and the face of our titular heroine Jenny (Hills) does so many subtly suggestive things that, if Beat Girl were a cartoon, you’d get a visual of steam coming out of her. Except it wouldn’t be coming out of her ears.

  And there’s all the best bits which involve implausibly sexy Brit teens frugging wildly in cellar clubs and Chislehurst Caves either to pop idol Adam Faith’s surreal-abilly Eddie Cochran tributes or the John Barry Seven’s unique blends of rock ’n’ roll and film noir jazz. There is something wildly enjoyable about watching the young Oliver Reed get so gone, Man, that his eyes roll around his head like he’s getting a world-class BJ. But not as wild or enjoyable as the dance floor action of Ms Hills, the feral offspring of Marlene Dietrich and an alien sex rodent, as she twists and writhes and narrows her cat eyes and stares you down with the kind of sexual arrogance that is every parent’s worst nightmare writ large. Gillian Hills would probably win the unofficial Best Teen Star In This Book award if someone hadn’t invented talking pictures thirty years before. When you look at her, the world is full of sordid action. But then the poor girl opens her mouth . . .

  Beat Girl’s seriously weird plot goes like this: Paul Linden (Farrar), a middle-aged posho architect, goes to Paris for a few months to get over his divorce and comes back with a French dolly-bird wife Nichole (Adam), who’s only eight years older than his 16-year-old daughter. Said daughter Jenny (Hills), who is already being turned into a Bad Lot by art school and hanging round Soho coffee bars listening to cool jazz and hot rock with other rich brats and token authentic working-class existentialist Adam Faith, gets really hostile. Meanwhile, Jenny’s chance meeting with Soho stripper Greta reveals that Stepmum has a sordid past. Jenny is handed a chance to expose the hypocrisy of Bad Dad while watching strippers in a sleazy club with just a little too much interest. Club owner Kenny (Lee) sees his chance to lure the disco dolly to a life of vice. It all ends in blood and chaos.

  This would all be entertainingly exploitative enough. But Beat Girl also has Big Ideas that transform a cheap rock movie into purest (s)existentialism, as you might expect from a French director who is obviously influenced by both film noir and his homeland’s nouvelle vague.

  Beat Girl’s subtexts emerge in two scenes. When Linden first takes Nichole home – if you can call this space-age office space home – to meet Jenny, the daughter quickly shows the Stepmother what she’s up against in the war for Daddy’s attentions. Linden’s obsession is ‘City 2000’, a proposed ‘fresh start’ for humanity which is currently a large circular model of identical high-rise blocks he finds so thrilling that poor Nichole finds her herself wrestling him away from its cubist Lego charms in order to get laid. Linden is such a post-Ayn Rand modernist that he literally wants to demolish human history and put us all in dystopian environments where ‘a man can be as alone as if he was 10,000 miles from anywhere’.

  This fear of modernism and the urban finds its echo in a scene where Jenny’s gang of friends go raving in Chislehurst Caves, where we find out that Adam Faith’s Dave is so virulently anti-booze, fighting and everything else that might be considered fun by teen boys (he’s very fond of declaring that all decadent pleasures are ‘for squares, Man’) that anyone would think he was only there to assure censors and shocked parents that the film is actually a very serious warning to kids not to do all the thrilling things that it’s putting onscreen. Once he’s told everyone off, the gang sit and talk about why they’re so gorgeously, nihilistically unimpressed by the world. It turns out that neither Mater, Pater, nor school or the government are the problem. The problem is that they were born in the Second World War, huddled in underground bunkers, hiding from death by doodlebug, expected to keep a sti
ff upper lip when Mummy got blitzed. ‘We’re like rats in a hole, that’s us,’ sneers Dave, the only street kid among these students from St Martin’s College, later the site of the first Sex Pistols show and where Jarvis Cocker had his fateful meeting with a posh bird who wanted to shag him ’cos he was common.

  A cave that could be ‘10,000 miles from anywhere’ appears to be the only place these kids feel safe enough to reveal the source of their angst. Soon, on their way back to Jenny’s for a parent-baiting party, they will be playing a game in which they rest their necks on rail tracks and wait for oncoming trains. Post-war progress, in the shape of cities, speed and more deadly potential wars, is coming to kill these kids. And none of them seems to mind too much.

  The anti-city theme is punched home at the movie’s end. Jenny is rescued from Soho’s sex trade and The Abyss by Dad and Step-mère. But as the music swells and the credits roll, the three are not being whisked away on happy-ever-afters. The three walk into Soho, and the shadows and neon and darkness and threat of London’s sleaziest square mile swallows them, making them look insignificant and doomed, just like rats in a hole.