A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Showing posts with label Sandra Dee. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sandra Dee. Show all posts

Thursday, August 7, 2025

Gidget (Paul Wendkos, 1959)

Sandra Dee and Cliff Robertson in Gidget
Cast: Sandra Dee, James Darren, Cliff Robertson, Arthur O'Connell, The Four Preps, Mary LaRoche, Joby Baker, Tom Laughlin, Sue George, Robert Ellis, Joe Morrow, Yvonne Craig, Patti Kane, Doug McClure, Burt Metcalfe. Screenplay: Gabrielle Upton, based on a novel by Frederick Kohner. Cinematography: Burnett Guffey. Art direction: Ross Bellah. Film editing: William A. Lyon. Music: Arthur Morton.

Deconstructing Gidget is an amusing pastime. This is a movie made four years after the publication of Lolita, in which Burt Vail, aka Kahuna (Cliff Robertson), a 36-year-old man, almost seduces Francie Lawrence, aka Gidget (Sandra Dee), a 17-year-old girl. (For another perspective, try to imagine Gidget being screened at the Jeffrey Epstein mansion.) Of course, the unmarried Kahuna also hangs around with a bunch of half-naked college boys. And Gidget has an androgynous friend called B.L. (Sue George) who claims to have a boyfriend we never meet. Eventually, to be sure, tomboy Gidget, who claims to be repulsed by the physical advances of boys, will succeed in the "man hunt" initiated by her other, more nubile girlfriends and land the handsome, hunky Jeffrey Matthews, aka Moondoggie (James Darren), one of Kahuna's male followers. It's a movie that launched sequels, a TV series, and a whole subgenre of beach party movies. But were we ever so naive as to take Gidget as just wholesome entertainment? 
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