Les dingues sont lâchés

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.

This sort of has special meaning to me, I graduated from high school and started college in 1963, the year this movie came out. Yet I had never heard of it until yesterday when I noticed it scheduled for broadcast on the "Movies!" channel which specializes in older movies.

It was also the year that President JFK was assassinated. And the year before my dad passed away.

This movie has a thin, straightforward story line. It is spring break and groups of college students drive to Palm Springs, California, to have some fun.

The main focus of the boys are a basketball team, they just want to have fun and hopefully pick up some pretty girls.

The pretty girls are less aggressive about it but hope to be noticed by cute guys. Connie Stevens plays a high school girl (she was 24) and represents herself as a 21-yr-old college girl from Hawaii.

So all that plays out against a backdrop of swimming, partying, and one big fight with uninvited guys at a house party.

All in all pretty forgettable silliness but entertaining for a decent representation of this type of movie from the 1960s. The cast includes several actors who became well-know in the years following, many of them just in a whole series of TV roles.

At home, received via antenna in my attic.

I enjoyed this film for what it was - an early 60's escapist film which was coming to grips with a quickly changing culture influenced by the effects of the pill and the coming social revolution. There are a few scenes in this movie that must have influenced movies like Animal House and others years later. A young Stefanie Powers makes a startling impression - goes to show how charming William Holden must have been to have made her his companion for the last 10 years of his life. Some good characters to watch here.

You have got to give Warner Bros studios credit for milking Troy Donahue for all they could get with the teenage audience....there was "Summer Place", "Parrish", "Susan Slade", "Rome Adventure"...Warner Bros was riding the high waves with Donahue for the teenage audience in the early 60s.......then they apparently decided to remake "Where the Boys Are"....this time the film is in Palm Springs California instead of Florida....Stephanie Powers more or less recreates the role Delores Hart had in "Where the Boys Are".....a young student looking for teenage/young adult love...Troy Donahue basically recreates the role George Hamilton had.....the handsome lover boy looking for romance.....basically corny and overly silly in a lot of respects. Plenty of comedy though as Jerry Van Dyke plays a over the top goofball who winds up with the homely down and out girl...sort of like the role Frank Gorshin had in Boys Are with Connie Francis....lots of similarities with both films. Troy Donahue did not have to do much acting...just stand around looking handsome and available and the gals ate him up. In a silly teenage film like this much acting was not required at all. For my money a scene near the end where Donahue and Stephanie Powers were standing in front of a fake, paper rock, supposedly in the desert was laughable....Powers says "look out there, see the sands, it is the valley of lost lovers" ha=ha-ha.....or something to that effect....Donahue stands there listening to her with a silly gape on his face....just totally laughable acting. Nothing like that old puss himself Jack Weston to play the lovable loser - he was the basketball coach trying to keep his players under control and falling for the matronly owner of the motel they were at....Weston always a lovable loser, just like in "The Cincinatti Kid" and "Thomas Crown Affair" in the 60s..... For my money Jerry Van Dyke steals the movie as a looney over the top comedian....once again, this is a teenage love flick at it's best....if you saw "Where the Boys Are" you have seen "Palm Springs Weekend"....just the same two films stitched together with different actors....Bob Conrad as the spoiled, rich kid with the fast T-Bird and Connie Stevens as the nubile, and very available coed....she gets mixed up with the wrong guy. Top notch film for the teenagers in the early 1960s.

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.