Where the Boys Are

Where the Boys Are
by Henry Levin

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DVD Reviews of Where the Boys Are

DVD Review: Sex, Sleaze and Sin in the Florida Sun
Summary: 2 Stars

Back in '60 when this flimsy film first played in a theatre near you, the Hollywood elite just as before, and just as now, corrupted the moral atmosphere by pushing abnormal, immoral themes as somehow "normal". Catch the original preview reel if you can, notice the blatantly trumped-up excitement, the false drama and so on. By putting Connie Francis in the lineup with that syrupy serenade title song, Hollywood knew they'd get extra bang for their buck from the pop music crowd as a result of "free" advertising every time the song was played on radios, jukeboxes and so on.

With one-dimensional characters and an equally thin story line, Where The Boys Are ostensibly displays four "girls" looking for "boys" while on Easter Break, vacationing in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. (Remember Easter, the day to commemorate the resurrection of Christ, cf. First Corinthians 15:1-4? In politically-correct, morally-incorrect times, the name was changed to "Spring Break" and other variations; ever wonder why "powers and principalities" have always tried to force God out of the picture since the Garden of Eden?)

I say ostensibly because the behind-the-scenes premise to the whole story seems to be an under-riding theme of abandoning the true standards of the day (and of eternity) and bringing out the worst in people in terms of their inner fears and desires apart from sound ethics. For the girls, the theme seems to be "Get married at any cost!" Lie, cheat, whatever. Play up to the guy, coo, flutter your eyelashes, fall all over him, beg for compliments. Look at every male within visual range and consider him a prospect for matrimony. Do whatever it takes to get a proposal within the first millisecond of meeting him, to paraphrase.

For the boys, the theme seems to be: "Get drunk, lie, have sex without commitment". It's interesting to note with 20/20 hindsight how these themes played themselves out on the larger screen of our U.S. culture throughout the 1960s, especially in view of the so-called sexual revolution, the abandonment of traditional values, the ever-increasing divorce rate, broken homes, abandoned latch-key children, forty-million abortions, the radical feminist movement of the early '70s, and on to today where we have almost complete chaos in our society, high crime, higher racism, and male/female role reversal. Now, women are out looking for "hotties" to have sex with, complete with AIDs and all the other STDs.

Ah, I digress. Back to the story. What we have here are four love stories, four little vignettes parlayed into a movie with Easter Break in Florida as a backdrop. In addition to physically being on vacation, the morals of the characters are evidently on vacation as well, a convenience brought about through the craft of script writing. What's the point of this film? Girl Number One is a Princess Grace of Monaco look alike, prim and proper, hailing from a "metropolis of 11,000" with her intelligence quotient for the movie (138), adamant about holding on to whatever chastity she has by playing along with a rich playboy, portrayed by George Hamilton. His character of course has a slight edge from a secular humanist viewpoint: he's got the yacht, the wealthy family background, and, oh, what the heck, let's throw in an I.Q. of 140 just to make the cherchez le femme interesting. Girl Number One decides to keep his sexual advances at bay but realizes this is a good catch because he's rich. How's that for shoddy values, ladies, marry the alcoholic womanizer for his money! This guy has Ted Kennedy written all over him, with lines like, "I usually tell women that I love them, but I've never told them that I like them, except for you, you're the first one I've ever really liked." Of course, since the focus is not on spiritual matters of truth and propriety but only on materialism, go for all the gusto you can and marry the millionaire, right!?! Girl Number One decides to pursue her boy later, after vacation ends and they return to the cold and snowy northland.

Girl Number Two is our dear Miss Francis. The script has her talking and acting like she's a "dog", some ugly mutt (who let the dogs out, woof, woof-woof-woof!). But folks, I have to tell you, Connie Francis has always been one of the most attractive females on the planet, so you just have to play along in your mind with this idea that she's ugly and therefore, no boys look at her, much less ask her out or propose to her. As luck would have it, she spies a goofy jazz bandleader, played by the much older Frank Gorshin (yes, that's right, The Riddler from the old Batman t.v. series). She engages in a pursuit of the musician who never praises her (like that night when she put on her green dress and green shoes) and somehow ingratiates herself to him when his coke-bottle thick glasses are broken and she is useful as his seeing-eye "dog", woof-woof. Somehow, she even sings a number with the band, I wonder how that happened.

Girl Number Three is Paula Prentiss, who went on to acting fame in other movies and of course in t.v. Her modus operandi is that she is a tall, geeky girl who would be even more hard-pressed to get a date/husband than Francis, except that Prentiss has "landed" the drunken Jim Hutton as her beau. So, while Prentiss counts herself lucky, Hutton consistently stays falling-down drunk. Gee, girls, every woman's dream, right. The movie builds to a climax when the main characters are all in a nightclub and Hutton goes lusting after an underwater dancer that the clubbers see through the glass sides of her tank. Of course, they all "somehow" end up in the tank, and then are taken to jail. Luckily, the high-pitched, squeaky-voiced Marilyn Monroe-based underwater dancer helps convince the local gendarmes that it was all a mistake, and the next thing you know she's out of her swimming suit and wearing a tight-fitting purple dress, singing and dancing on the beach while Hutton lusts on and Prentiss tries to hang on to him.

Girl Number Four is the tragedy. She evidently is fast and easy and drinks a lot of alcohol. She even told her parents some lie about where she is, just so she could go down to Florida for sleaze and sin in the sand. She hooks up with another drunk staying in a hotel room downstairs from where the four girls have their quarters. She eventually gets raped "or something" and wanders around in a suicidal haze, almost getting struck out in traffic. Notice how her dress is ripped in the close-shot scenes, but when she's wandering across the street, the dress is somehow not ripped.

The slap to traditional values ends as vacation ends and everyone has to pack up and go back where they came from, with or without marriage plans.

I rate this movie a two out of a possible five; it's interesting to view if you want to start pinpointing how Hollywood undermines true, unchanging values (see my review of "Sabrina" with Audrey Hepburn on DVD). After watching "Where The Boys Are" through the view of an eternal perspective, you can't help but wonder Where The Men and Women Are.

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