This is an exceptional flick. Seldom have former stars like Dana Andrews and Jeanne Craine appeared in such slapdash schlock. Every five minutes brings a fresh laugh.
No sense going through the story except to say that the ultra-straight Andrews family, including his wife Craine, his nubile teenage daughter (Mock), and a less than usually loathsome young boy, head out West where Andrews has just bought a motel/café in the middle of an unpopulated desert. They are harassed along the way -- and at the motel -- by the most retrograde bunch of rich, clean, white juvenile delinquents imaginable.
This, mind you, is 1967. The Andrews family could still be found lying around in 1967. But the reckless adolescents? Expensive, customized "souped-up sardine cans," clean and pressed clothing, duck-tailed haircuts, without tattoos, drugless and abstinent? That, my friend, is from a 1955 screenplay.
Jeanne Craine looks snazzy, but the particular charm she brought to her early movies -- "Leave Her to Heaven" and "State Fair" -- is lacking. It isn't that she seems defeated by the stereotypical role of the hysterical and helpless Mom. It's that she doesn't know how to play it believably. Well, maybe she was more concerned with her real family than this fictional one.
Dana Andrews is equally unsubtle as the uptight and moralistic pater familias. He looks were evidently coarsened by years of boozing but that's okay. The family head doesn't need to be a glamor boy. But the problem is that HE seems to be phoning in his part too -- snarling and scowling and muttering about these damned kids today. I can't stop laughing as I think about the movie, though the last time I saw it must have been ten years ago.
Laurie Mock as the daughter who falls for one of the hell-bent gang, presents her symptoms thus: a great big bouffant hair do and phony eyelashes the size of window awnings. They must flap in the breeze, though her hair never does, frozen into place as it must be by an entire can of Fixative. She's really slinky though. The hoodlum may have no taste in cars or Renaissance band music but he knows a babe when he sees one. Good grief -- she bounces so gracefully when she walks.
The music is to the ears what the visuals are to the eye. If you have never been rapidly and repeatedly hit over the head with kettle drum mallets, this must be what it feels like. Boom boom boom boom -- agitato, so to speak.
Worth catching for its laugh-inducing quotient.
No sense going through the story except to say that the ultra-straight Andrews family, including his wife Craine, his nubile teenage daughter (Mock), and a less than usually loathsome young boy, head out West where Andrews has just bought a motel/café in the middle of an unpopulated desert. They are harassed along the way -- and at the motel -- by the most retrograde bunch of rich, clean, white juvenile delinquents imaginable.
This, mind you, is 1967. The Andrews family could still be found lying around in 1967. But the reckless adolescents? Expensive, customized "souped-up sardine cans," clean and pressed clothing, duck-tailed haircuts, without tattoos, drugless and abstinent? That, my friend, is from a 1955 screenplay.
Jeanne Craine looks snazzy, but the particular charm she brought to her early movies -- "Leave Her to Heaven" and "State Fair" -- is lacking. It isn't that she seems defeated by the stereotypical role of the hysterical and helpless Mom. It's that she doesn't know how to play it believably. Well, maybe she was more concerned with her real family than this fictional one.
Dana Andrews is equally unsubtle as the uptight and moralistic pater familias. He looks were evidently coarsened by years of boozing but that's okay. The family head doesn't need to be a glamor boy. But the problem is that HE seems to be phoning in his part too -- snarling and scowling and muttering about these damned kids today. I can't stop laughing as I think about the movie, though the last time I saw it must have been ten years ago.
Laurie Mock as the daughter who falls for one of the hell-bent gang, presents her symptoms thus: a great big bouffant hair do and phony eyelashes the size of window awnings. They must flap in the breeze, though her hair never does, frozen into place as it must be by an entire can of Fixative. She's really slinky though. The hoodlum may have no taste in cars or Renaissance band music but he knows a babe when he sees one. Good grief -- she bounces so gracefully when she walks.
The music is to the ears what the visuals are to the eye. If you have never been rapidly and repeatedly hit over the head with kettle drum mallets, this must be what it feels like. Boom boom boom boom -- agitato, so to speak.
Worth catching for its laugh-inducing quotient.