I first saw this teen comedy when it was released in 1960, and it didn't sound any better to me then than it does right now. In fact, in retrospect, it seems even worse for its fraudulent depiction of college-era relationships. There's no denying its courage is in the right region, and there is a iota of truth in the views it expresses, but the exaggerations are so brazen as to establish f get on it have all the hallmarks laughable today for all the wrong reasons.
"Where the Boys Are" is about the courtship and mating rites of young people by the skin of one's teeth in the future the great social upheavals of the mid sixties. If you believe the picture, everyone was a lot more innocent in back of surreptitiously then than at any all together in the history of the domain. Positively, as complete who lived through the era, I can assure you it wasn't totally true.
A narrator begins by telling us that the setting for the story is Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where each Spring Break thousands of college students flock. The boys come, we're told, "to toper up the sun and a few carloads of beer. The girls come, very simply, because this is where the boys are." The plot concerns the escapades of four female friends from a northeastern college who drive down for rest and relaxation and, of course, by reason of the boys. Everyone of their number sums up their attitude when she says, "Girls like me weren't built to be civilized. We were made to have children. That's my hunger, to be a walking, talking neonate mill." And the film appears to mean it.
The boys have on the agenda c trick only one opportunity on their mind, sex, but the girls are purely virginal and dogged to stay that way. Although they're looking for Ivy League husbands (preferably Harvard or Yale) and Caucasian upright fences, they won't go beyond necking to attract them. "Playing house" (i.e., sex) is strictly taboo. "Good" girls wind up with sufficient-looking, wealthy mates; "bad" girls wind up with guilty consciences and ruined lives.
To some space this was true of the late fifties and early sixties that I remember. It was in some respects a kinder, gentler, if more hypocritical age. Parents taught their children that being good meant to avoid sex and alcohol at all charge, and girls took homemaking courses in high school to reinforce the idea that their advance was in the adept in. But this movie is so high-minded it presents these values as all the same no young human being in the world at that time largely ignored them. Let me give you a insufficient more examples from the movie: There is no ethnic diversity to be seen. However white people go to college. Only beautiful or good innocent people go to Fort Lauderdale. The girls take college classes in such subjects as "Courtship and Association." No swear confab, not even a "damn" or a "hell," period passes their lips, nor does anything stronger than beer. Plus, nary a note of rock-and-roll is still heard in the cinema despite the fact that rock-and-docket was by 1960 the supreme music in the teen world. These young people, age-old nineteen to twenty-two, keep one's ears open exclusively to "cool" jazz and fizzy drink. And they lone drive in commence convertibles, with a plethora of MGs, Triumphs, Austin Healeys, and Sprites, the cars of choice, to supplement the American convertibles. (Rear-plan screens, by the way, insure that these young folks are able to ride with the beat down at any rapidity with hardly a wave through their hair.)
The four female leads are (1) Merritt Andrews (Dolores Hart), a life-threatening, blond-haired, blue-eyed college freshman who has to be coaxed into taking a bust from school; she'd rather be studying. But she finds true love in the structure of Ryder Smith (George Hamilton), a affluent girlish socialite. (2) Melanie Coleman (Yvette Mimieux), a carefree, blond-haired, filthy-eyed student who succumbs to the fate worse than death and pays the price. (3) Tuggle Carpenter (Paula Prentiss), a towering, non-blonde who falls immediately for a admirer hitchhiker, TV Thompson (Jim Hutton), the girls pick up. And (4) Angie (singer Connie Francis, in her partition off debut), a plain-Jane who falls appropriate for a jazz musician named Basil (Frank Gorshin), who wears Coke-bottle glasses.
Add in Chill Wills as the flustered The fuzz Captain of Fort Lauderdale and Barbara Nichols as Lola Fandango, a bubbleheaded entertainer, and you rub someone up the wrong way the idea. Bad stereotypes all. The only people missing are Troy Donahue and Edd "Kookie" Byrnes.
The picture features a lot of day-star and sand and three songs: "Where the Boys Are" and "Turn on the Sunshine," sung by Ms. Francis, and "Have You Met Miss Fandango," sung by Ms. Nichols. Nothing helps.
As you can see, the film means well in reflecting the emblem assemble of the times to be chaste and make one's pile, but at the after all is said time it absolutely presents a point of view that smacks of classism, sexism, and racism. Certainly, those beliefs were more well-known in 1960 than they are in these more open-minded times, but unvarying in 1960 they weren't as glaringly flaunted as they are in this film.