Weekend em Palm Springs

If you like swinging hips and swinging fists and you are of a certain birth vintage, namely a baby boomer from the 50's or 60's then the 1963 Palm Springs Weekend will be right up your alley. With up and coming stars such as Connie Francis, Stefanie Powers, Ty Hardin, Troy Donahue, and Robert Conrad, you have all the making of another beach blanket bonanza with swinging hips and fists as the beach parties get pretty hot and heavy.

The film packs a mighty punch with lots of lips a smacking and fists a flying as the boys and girls at the Palm Springs Hotel are there for a good time and not a long time while on a weeks vacation school break. There are new romances for some of the older generation as well as some of the first teenage loves. Heck there is even an attractive tom boy named Amanda North (played by Zeme North) who while babysitting the hotel owners son Boom Boom Yates (Bill Mumy) she has achieved a black belt in the art of Jiu Jitsu and uses her martial arts skills to put some unorthodox moves on her love interest Biff Roberts (Jerry Van Dyke).

This beach blanket hipster is the original fun loving film which preceded the latter and more successful 1965 Beach Blanket Bingo and other beach related films. It may be old and the (then) young film stars such as Ty Hardin, Troy Donahue, and Robert Conrad have now passed away but their youthful images live on in campy classics such as Palm Springs Weekend.

I give the film a respectable 6 out of 10 IMDb rating.

Palm Springs Weekend which was unashamedly ripped off from Where The Boys Meet The Girls, gave the Warner Brothers television stars a last time to strut their stuff before the cameras. Within three years all of these contract players would be gone from the Warner lot as the British invasion led by the Beatles reconstructed the whole idea of what a teen heartthrob was supposed to be.

Troy Donahue(Surfside Six), Ty Hardin(Bronco), and Robert Conrad (Hawaiian Eye), are all on spring break and bound for that favorite west coast location, Palm Springs. While there Donahue gets involved with Stefanie Powers the police chief's daughter and Hardin and Conrad get to fight over Connie Stevens who's lying about her age. She's borderline jailbait, but looks old.

In that department Connie was the most ludicrous, but the notion that these guys were all students of some kind is beyond belief. All of them were past 25 at this point, they must have felt ridiculous. But the stars of 90210 didn't look much like high school kids so nothing's really changed.

But romance was in the air in Palm Springs Weekend, even Jack Weston the college basketball coach gets to have a fling with hotel owner Carole Cook. Best in the film is Jerry Van Dyke who supplies some needed comic relief and plays a mean banjo.

Still the film really hasn't worn well over the decades. But it's pleasant enough entertainment. Troy Donahue gets to sing over the title credits. That was a mistake.

If you're after fun, escapist, Kennedy-era entertainment with a WB vs. AIP budget, sit back and enjoy "Palm Springs Weekend" for what it is: A bunch of kids (most of whom will never see twenty again) invading the popular resort community for the weekend, getting into all sorts of romantic trials and tribulations, with the inevitable happy ending.

Troy Donahue, then at the height of his fame, is the nominal hero of the story, a nice young medical student affectionately called "Dr. Jekyll." He has remarkably little to do, however, and it's the more colorful supporting characters who keep your interest through the film: Jerry Van Dyke as Donahue's wackyzanynutty best friend, Robert Conrad (just pre-"Wild, Wild West") as the particularly slimy heavy of the piece, Ty Hardin as the rodeo cowboy turned football hero (He's got steer horns affixed to the front of his car. You know the type), Connie Stevens as the "good girl" who gets in way over her head when she falls for Conrad, and Jack Weston and Carole Cook providing love among the oldsters as the boys' football coach and a local hotel owner, respectively. For the obligatory musical interlude, we have the Modern Folk Quartet performing in a nightclub sequence. See if you can spot a young Cyrus Faryar among the latter.

Norman Tourog's direction is appropriately easy and breezy, and the screenplay is by the young Earl Hamner, Jr. ("The Waltons"). Check your brain at the door and get in the mood for some early-60's-style fun. You'll be glad you did.

The above quote is from the Broadway musical "A Chorus Line," and came to mind as I watched this piece of nostalgia from the '60s.

For baby boomers, Palm Springs Weekend is incredible fun; we get to see all of the TV stars we grew up with: Troy Donahue, Stefanie Powers, Robert Conrad, Connie Stevens, Jerry van Dyke, Ty Hardin, Billy Mumy, and old-timers Carole Cook, Andrew Duggan, and Jack Weston.

There's not what you'd call a plot, exactly. A bunch of kids descend on Palm Springs Weekend for fun in the sun and find romance. Soft-spoken, pretty Connie Stevens plays a young woman who takes up with a rich man's son (Robert Conrad); he turns out to have a quite a temper. All the while, she flirts with a cowboy (Ty Hardin, and I had forgotten how handsome he was). Cook runs the motel where everyone is staying; Mumy is her brat son; Duggan is the police chief of Palm Springs; and Powers is his daughter, who ends up involved with Donahue, a med student.

Donahue gets top billing and sings the theme song, sort of. He looks bloated here and overly made up, and definitely not as good as he looked in his earlier films. However, there was always something appealing about him and he always managed to hold his own. His stature and strong speaking voice helped. The humor, often provided by clownish Jerry van Duke, is obvious and geared to the teen set. Since it was made for the teens of the early '60s, the movie succeeds very well if not compared to something like Citizen Kane.

Palm Springs Weekend is sure a look back in time and a fun one, even if some of those college kids seemed a little long in the tooth.

I first saw this movie as a young person under 10, and didn't understand the dramatic essence. I think this is probably Robert Conrad's best dramatic part, very troubled and complex.

The car, a 1963 Thunderbird roadster, still is the real star of this movie, as far as I am concerned. The comedy was adequate for the era, but a bit over the top.

The car chase is, for it's time very appropriate, but as a child I was very concerned about Stretch, LOL such an altruistic lad, I think Stephanie Powers is one of the most beautiful female actresses that has ever graced the screen!

This is a great movie for historians, if they care to investigate the culture and mores of 1963.