Sunday, April 09, 2023

Movie review - "For Those Who Think Young" (1964) **

 Half the film is stock beach party stuff - rich James Darren chases after poor (ish) Pamela Tiffin. Darren is a sleazy red flag which is stock for this sort of plot, but Tiffin is lively and pretty, and there's stuff on the beach. And I enjoyed Bob Denver as a beatnik and Nancy Sinatra as his girlfriend (Dean Martin's daughter Claudia is in this too). That's all fine.

But the other half of the film is, amazingly, a vehicle for some unfunny comic Woody Woodbury, who is loosely connected to the other story by being Tiffin's uncle but has his own plot about being a duo with Paul Lynde, then Woodbury does a nightclub act that is apparently hilarious - we get lots and lots of it on screen - and the Dean wants to shut down the nightclub.

Ellen Burstyn, then under a different name, is fun as a woman who tries to shut down the club and falls for Woodbury. George Raft cameos as a cop during a final raid.

But this movie is dumb. Annoying. Woodbury gets too much screen time. It's all resolved with an unconvincing deux ex machina - the Dean used to be a bootlegger. I mean, WTF.

Made by Frank Sinatra's producing company!


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