June 27 movie: Where The Boys Are. Early 60s comedy about four college women on spring break in Fort Lauderdale, back in the days before spring break in Fort Lauderdale meant jello shots and "Girls Gone Wild." The cast was great: Dolores Hart, Yvette Mimieux, Paula Prentiss and Connie Francis (who sings the title song) as the girls, and George Hamilton, Jim Hutton and Frank Gorshin as the boys.
From this movie I learned that premarital sex results in being run over by a car. How, you ask? Well it's simple. You get run over because you're wandering around in the street in a daze. Why are you wandering around in shock? Because you were raped. Why were you raped? You brought it on yourself, with your uncontrollable, soul-crushing promiscuity. Why were you such a slut? Because you had sex. Once. And then you just couldn't help yourself. Duh!
Okay, so you might have guessed that I had a problem with the sexual politics of this movie. The drama parts were appalling, and the comic parts were merely insulting (example: "Girls like me aren't made to be educated. We're made to be walking baby factories.")
It made me wonder, were women in college in the 60s really like that? Did they really treat the experience as nothing more than a way to grab that MRS degree? Would they really be angling for a proposal from a guy they'd only known for five days? It all seemed so cynical.
I've seen this movie, and it left me unsettled and a bit depressed. Which is how I felt the other day after I saw the last third of "The Group." Have you seen it? I did a quick archive search but it didn't turn up. That movie had a depressing message about the shattered ideals of "college women" in the Class of 1933 from a Vassar-like school. If it was about something other than that, I didn't pick up on it!
(then again, I didn't see the whole thing. And I didn't figure out that the mother from Arrested Development was in it until the very end credits. at least THAT was mildly amusing)