Gidget

My grandmother, Mary, was 15 years old when she first saw the first Gidget (1959) movie with Sandra Dee and James Darren, in The New Bell Theatre in Bellflower California. She and her best friend Eunice saw a movie about growing up, discovering boys, and learning lessons. Francie is a 16 year old girl, blonde and pretty, but very young in appearance. She is recruited by her female Francie to begin a "man-hunt" on the beach where they live in sunny California, and Francie reluctantly follows. As they sit on the beach, Francie's friends try to lure the muscular tanned college men over, while the guys are referring to them as jailbait, and Francie urges the girls to join her swimming. It is not that she has no interest in boys, but as Francie told her mother, "when they start smoothing and pawing, UH doesn't it make you sick too mama?!" Mama assures her that she just needs to find the right man. So the search begins.

As we watched the movie, my grandmother pointed out things she had thought as a young adolescent girl, and also things that she thought of now that had been difficult to put into words at a young age. "That blue of the ocean, oh, even as a young girl, from then on it meant sexuality to me," my grandma confides, as she looks to see that no one else heard her. As Francie breaks away from her friends, she begins to find her self more and more, in the middle of a group of about eight very attractive, muscular, and tanned men, all older than she is, teaching her how to ride those big blue waves. The guys call her Gidget, a cross between Girl and Midget, which is a barrier to Francie in the beginning, because it shows that the guys only see her as a little girl.

My grandmother explained as we watched this film together, that this movie was what "made me look at those things in a different way. I had more interest in boys at the end of the movie!" It was the first teenage love story she had ever seen, and she seemed to almost regress to a teenager as we watched the movie together. "Oh, James Darren is such a hunk!" and "I had such a crush on him..."and "what cute clothes she wears!" She commented that after this movie she made it a point to make her wardrobe similar to Sandra Dee's. "Those shirts with the hood like you wear today, they were popular back then too." She went on to say that when girls wanted to get clothes like Gidget's, they shopped at Judy's, and that it was "the absolute place! And I got to shop there!" I could hear her begin to revert to the phrases she used as a teenager as she got excited about the fashions of her childhood.

Before the movie began, my Grandma thought about what she remembered most clearly about the movie. "I remember the dress she wore, and what color it was. It sticks in my mind to this day." During the scene where Gidget gets dressed to go to the luau, my grandmother interrupts the movie to tell me something else. "There's the dress! I don't even like orange, in fact, I hate the color orange...but that's a very special dress to me."

This movie was filmed in vibrant color and shot on the beach in Malibu. This alone drew many young people to the film. It was about discovering sex and growing up, and teenagers of the fifties were very interested. This movie was memorable to my grandma and to her friends of the fifties because of a combination longing to be on a beach surfing with hunky surf bums and the excitement for the beginning of love stories made especially for teens. Sandra Dee was the perfect teenage girl in the eyes of the youth in the fifties, because she was pretty, sweet, innocent, and smart, yet she still had the sense of adventure, rebellion, and need for sex in which the kids of the fifties were becoming more and more interested.

Francie Lawrence (Sandra Dee) is sixteen going on seventeen. She follows her friends who are out manhunting at the beach. She gets in trouble while swimming and gets rescued by surfer Moondoggy (James Darren). Her father tries to set her up with a proper gentleman but all she wants to do is surf. She befriends The Big Kahuna (Cliff Robertson) who follows the waves around the globe. The guys give her the nickname Gidget, girl plus midget.

I'm a little surprised by some of the rougher edges. I was expecting Frankie and Annette but this has a few aspects that are more interesting. The fact that she starts out more as a tomboy is interesting. The fact that she's surfing is outright ahead of its time. The Big Kahuna's globetrotting beach bum lifestyle is interesting. The guys taking in the little girl as one of their own is interesting. This does usher in the new genre of beach party movies. It's tiki torches and long wood surf boards. It does get into an uncomfortable age difference. It would have been great if Kahuna is simply joking around from the start. It is still struggling with some old fashion romantic entanglements. This is a very good teen movie and starting a new genre deserves some praise.

This movie came out in 1959, when I was a teenager too. It was a simpler time, and this is a fresh movie, compared to all the forced sex and dirty language added to most 'teen' movies nowadays.

Sandra Dee had just turned 16 when 'Gidget' was filmed in the summer of 1958, but even though she is small she comes across as a bit more mature. In fact, my wife guessed incorrectly that she was around 22. She may not have had a long or productive career, but she was just perfect as the gidget befriending a group of surfer bums that memorable summer in California.

Mom and dad want to fix their daughter up with this nice young man, a musician, son of an upstanding family. But she wants no part of her parents' plan, instead hanging out with her girl friends. One day at the beach, some somewhat older boys, and one 30-something beach bum, ignore the girls, but 'Moondoggie' goes out and saves 'Gidget' when she becomes entangled in seaweed. She gets hooked on surfing, buys a used board, by mid-summer is surfing as 'one of the guys.' She has fallen for 'Moondoggie' (James Darren, 23) but he just looks at her as a kid. When he eventually comes around, they find out that they are each the same two people that their parents' had tried to fix them up with at the start of the movie.

The nicest thing about this movie is depicting simpler teen times without sex and foul language.

All right, so it's not a masterpiece of moviemaking, but the film is still widely shown today and adored by most of those who see it. The slight, but very perceptive story concerns a plucky teenage girl nick-named Gidget(contractions of the words Girl and Midget) who mostly just wants to have fun in the sun. There's nothing wrong with that. But she's getting to that certain age where she's beginning to have deeper feelings, especially about the opposite sex. She begins to fall for a more "mature" surf bum(Cliff Robertson), but then finally settles for Moon-doggie(James Darren) who is closer to her own age. Some people might dismiss GIDGET as standard studio corn, but I beg to differ! It's not your typical sixties teen beach movie about surfing, sand, and sex. GIDGET actually has a story to tell. Maybe I'm being slightly sentimental, but to me GIDGET is a beautiful coming-of-age story that can still teach the teenagers of today a valuable lesson about first love. For those of you who didn't already know it, GIDGET was played by the beautiful young Sandra Dee who was a hot item in her day. Dee was seventeen and at her liveliest when she made this film. I would also say she was at her most appealing. She's on the screen for most of the film's 95minutes, and she's an absolute joy to watch for the film's entire running. Needless to say, I thought Dee was irresistably charming in this film. It's easy to see why she was so popular and such an idol to teenage girls in the sixties. She's blonde, beautiful, spirited, and has a terrific personality. It's a pity she doesn't make more films today. Having seen most of her films, I must say that in addition to being a pretty face, she is also a good actress. I could watch her for hours and hours. I may only be a simple 21-year-old boy from cincinnati, but I really enjoy and appreciate older films like this. They're fun and teach a lesson without being too preachy. If you're at the local video store one night and want something that's not too complex and is just good, clean fun, then GIDGET is highly recommended!!!!! And yes, this is the film that spawned the equally popular hit TV series starring another fresh and exciting talent, Sally Field.

I don't think you can get much further away from the stuff I usually watch like Cannibal Holocaust or Zombi 2 than Sandra Dee and Gidget. It's impossible not to enjoy Dee's performance. She's bubbly, spunky, and cute. What's not to like? Overall, Gidget is a sweet little movie that, for the most part, is entertaining. On the downside, far too often the sweetness turns into sappiness - something I cannot stomach.

Gidget is definitely a product of another time. Incidents that would automatically mean "sex" in a film made today are quite innocent and harmless in Gidget. A girl telling her mother that she wants to feel like a woman only means that she wants to fall in love and have a boyfriend. And watching with jaded 21st Century eyes, it's hard to imagine The Big Kahuna not being brought up on charges.