Surfing Hollow Days

Bruce Brown takes his audience around the world, from Australia and New Zealand, sitting in Fiji, to Hawaii, Southern California and even riding the waves at Miami Beach.

It's filled with corny humor and alligators, the Pipeline off Hawaii and ice in the Southern Alps, and beautifully composed silhouettes of surfers enjoying their buzz on boards while riding through the curl of immense torrents. Brown's calm narration is in stark contrast to the clear danger of the situations. That water looks dangerous at the Pipeline, where one of his companions is the first known person to surf. By the time you get to Miami Beach with its waves breaking at five feet, you feel a bit blase, and then its back to the Pipeline.

The music is definitely into the 1960s, with well-remembered hits like "Tequila". I think it's the best of his surfing movies.

Any surfing movie by Bruce Brown beats going to the dentist by a big margin, or for that matter watching most anything offered on tv. This one is certainly entertaining but a step behind the Endless Summers and Barefoot Adventure. Second part, which includes the group's discovery of the Pipeline in Hawaii, is better than the first part, although the first part features a hilarious hook-up between surfers and a real 15 foot shark. As with anything but the Endless Summers, buy the video if you wanna watch 'cause you won't see this on TBS any time this century.

I chose this particular Bruce Brown surfing doc to watch and review although I could just have easily gone with "Dangerous When Wet", "Surf Crazy" or the most famous of them, "Endless Summer", because they are all basically the same movie; elegies, odes, tone poems, love letters or whatever you want to call them to this most sublime of sports. And like all of them it celebrates a world of eternal lightness. Even when the weather is foggy or chilly, once you get in the water it's all good. Yes, there are shark sightings and wipeouts but they somehow do not feel ominous or fatal. None of the many surfers shown are frowning or angry or brooding except in a cartoonish/comic way. And Brown's breezy, cheeky, but still informative on the nuances of wave riding, Socal voice becomes seductive after a few minutes and you find yourself sucked in like, well, a surfer in a curl. Maybe it helps to have grown up near the beach, like I did, but I suspect that even 1960s residents of Wichita or Lausanne were at least somewhat charmed. Give it a B.

PS...Speaking of Lausanne, it's interesting that the most visually striking part of this film concerns not surfing, but skiing.

PSS...Note to RNMorton above...Saw it on TCM.