For Those Who Think Young

I read a few of the other comments. So critical! I loved the movie. Just to see Tina, Bob, James, Nancy and Paul in their prime. The movie was meant for fun...not a literary study for correctness. True the jokes were corny...but hey...anything that attempts to make us laugh and be clean at the same time is so rare today. The movies today have more violence more cursing more junk...I tell ya i sure miss the days of jerry lewis and dean and Abbott and Costello...Ernest P Worrell...Movies like these are treasures. I remember sitting with my mom as a kid and watching James Darren. It wasn't the movie, it was the man...and the cast...Or where are the Red Skeltons of today? Remember the times when entertainers ended with and "May God Bless" and meant it. Roy Rogers ended his TV show with "May the Good Lord Take a Likin to ya" I see movies to day that are really funny and have so much profanity in them, when the movie would had been funny without them. I sure miss movies like "For those who think Young". I miss the musicals. James Darren singing...Elvis singing, Dean Martin singing, Ricky Nelson singing, Frank, Bing, and beach movies with Gary Lewis, Jan and Dean...Frankie and Annette...and the movies left a song you could hum, sing a long and feel good about yourself...the romance...made you think of good things and good hopes for the future. I am in my 40's and hardly ever go to movies anymore. Maybe one a year. Sure there are the DVD's but there are not the entertainers that just make you want to go see them, as it used to be...Where are the John Waynes? Where are the movies that made feel good about being an American? So in conclusion...this movie may not be a critics love-lore but it sure is better than most of the crap on screen today.

Unfortunately, I can't think of many good things to say about the film.

FOR THOSE WHO THINK YOUNG functions basically as a long, long commercial for Pepsi-Cola. Even the title of the film is the direct quote of a catch phrase used in Pepsi radio and TV commercials of the early 1960s. There are blatant product placements throughout the film, notably a huge Pepsi dispensing machine placed directly in the center of several shots of a night club bar.

The story line is a rip-off of the BEACH PARTY genre, with James Darren doing his best Frankie Avalon imitation, even down to look alike hair style and obviously phony suntan. Poor Pamela Tiffin looks terribly uncomfortable trying to fill the shoes (and swimsuit) of Annette Funicello. To bridge the gap between shots of Pepsi logos, there are the typical "crazed youth" beach activities (tribal-style ritual dances, a bunch of actors grabbing surfboards at the call "Surf's Up!", then paddling out into a perfectly flat ocean, followed by stock footage of real surfers riding huge waves).

There are also several long sequences of comedian Woody Woodbury doing his night club act. The humor in these segments is extremely dated, and falls flat, only serving to bring the story to a grinding halt while on screen. Tina Louise adds some visual spice as an exotic dancer, but Paul Lynde is wasted in the role of a wisecracking musician. Bob Denver plays his typical off-center Gilligan/Maynard G. Krebs character (seemingly the only thing he is capable of).

Darren and Tiffin were also featured together in a companion piece called THE LIVELY SET, a similar but more interesting film with a racing car theme. This film also served to plug Pepsi-Cola, and the cast even featured Joanie Sommers (the manufactured singer who hit the charts with "Johnny Get Angry"), and who provided (coincidentally, no doubt) the singing voice for Pepsi commercials in real life.

Overall, FOR THOSE WHO THINK YOUNG is an curio from a bygone age, contrived and derivative. Any similarity to real life in the pre-flower power, pre-Vietnam era is purely coincidental.

Although they share no on-screen time, Bob Denver and Tina Louise (reported rivals on TV's "Gilligan's Island") make their one and only film together, with Denver playing a beatnik and Louise stealing the show as a tone-deaf dancer. Acting accolades are really quite scarce here as the movie--a comedy about college kids awakening to civic rights while partying on the beach--is fairly dim-witted and slow on laughs. As one of the adults on hand, Ellen Burstyn (née McRae) does a drunk act with the best of them, but romantic leads James Darren and Pamela Tiffin are easily forgotten. Brunette Nancy Sinatra (pre-"Boots") is cute as Denver's girlfriend, and it is fun to catch all these stars together in one place. Few of them ever crossed paths again. ** from ****

I saw this movie during a dusk until dawn show at a Drive-In theater many years ago. These shows would keep you up all night watching all kinds of stuff. I can't remember the entire show that night but to me this was one of the ultimate drive-in movies. It is a beach movie without Frankie & Annette.

When you weren't old enough to be in the back seat of the car with someone, there were enough women on the screen to keep your attention. The comedy in this is sophomore stuff, and to me the most interesting thing is the casting. Woody Woodbury had a comedy LP album at the time this was released. Bet that is a collectors item now as it set a martini mood & really dovetails with this movie as his routines here are watered down versions of that album.

What is most surprising about the women in this film is how many would become famous but yet none of them really ever did a block buster film. Never realized until I looked at this cast that Tina Louise is older than Nancy Sinatra. This was before both of them would achieve their greatest fame, Nancy with music, & Tina with Bob Denver as this is an earlier place to find them in the same film. Tina is a stripper in this movie, & Denver is James Darren's assistant & a bit of a playboy. Bob Denver leads the Ho Daddy Chorus but this song is not about calling women by that name. I would call most of them attractive.

Paul Lynde is pretty much his usual self here. There were worse fillers for these dusk till dawn drive-in films of the earlier 1960's fillers.

My main reason for watching For Those Who Think Young was to see Woody Woodbury believe it or not. I remember watching Who Do You Trust after I came home from school and I never did get to see the film that he incessantly plugged during the show.

I wasn't missing a whole lot, For Those Who Think Young makes the beach films of Frankie and Annette look like Shakespeare or O'Neill. The substitute leads here are James Darren and Pamela Tiffin standing in for Frankie and Annette. Jim's a rich kid whose grandfather Robert Middleton tightly controls the family purse strings and he's had to practically buy the college he's going to in order to keep Jim there.

Pam is Woody's niece and she's been raised by him and his partner Paul Lynde in the club and she occasionally strips. But she wants to better herself. Not by marrying a rich kid though, especially if its my grandson says Middleton.

I will say this about For Those Who Think Young, it has one of the most eclectic casts ever assembled for a film at that time. Imagine seeing such veteran performers as Anna Lee, Addison Richards, Sammee Tong, Allen Jenkins and Benny Baker and even George Raft in an unbilled part as a police officer raiding Woodbury's club. Put them together with Bob Denver and Tina Louise before Gilligan's Island and the daughters of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin also playing college coed friends of Tiffin's and you have a cast for the ages.

If you're a fan of the Beach films than you will like For Those Who Think Young. As for me this goes back to when I was young.

And this review is dedicated to Woody Woodbury who while his career never went the way his predecessor on Who Do You Trust, Johnny Carson's did, I still have good memories of him and the show.