The Young Swingers

A year before SURF PARTY and with WILD ON THE BEACH to follow in director Maury Dexter's "surf trilogy," THE YOUNG SWINGERTS has technically little to do with the beach, only youth and music... Lots of music...

Although a horribly unfunny young comic tells a joke about being near the Pacific Ocean on stage at a Hootenanny nightclub that a vicious old lady wants to tear down while her cute blond niece falls in love with our whiny leading young man...

Meanwhile, the only real musician... other than an extremely dated folk duo... is Gene McDaniels, whose track "Compared To What" played in both 1990's cult movies BOOGIE NIGHTS and CASINO (though he sings another tune here).

Basically, these SWINGERS desperately need a beach to have a good time at so we can too. The whole film's really just a showcase going back and forth from the club's music-filled exterior to a stuffy office in an awkward, uninteresting fashion. In fact, THE YOUNG SWINGERS doesn't feel like a Maury Dexter movie at all. With limited locations and dull characters, it's simply no fun i.e. this bad isn't good at all.

Here's a teen musical-comedy-drama so tame that the singin' folkies actually substitute 'hmmm' for 'damn' when they perform Greenback Dollar. The Young Swingers is 1963's version of all those 50s rock n roll movies where the uptight grown ups try to evict the kids from their happenin' night club. Ho hum. The only point of interest in this otherwise snooze inducing film is the presence of Gene McDaniels, and he doesn't even get to sing 'A Hundred Pounds of Clay'. After ruining the teen musical genre with this effort, director Dexter went on to direct Mini Skirt Mob, the worst biker movie of all time. Star Rod Lauren's next assignment was on the dreadful but enjoyable Crawling Hand, and the delightfully named Molly Bee concluded her film career four years later in Hillbillys in the Haunted House.

Any time you see B-minus director Maury Dexter and actor Rod Lauren in the same film, you know it's not going to win any awards. The plot is so familiar it's like a pair of old shoes: grouchy, music-hating, and money-hungry adults want to kick music-loving kids out of their struggling club in order to tear the building down. Lauren plays Mel Hudson, who runs "The Vanguard", music club with a variety of live acts. He battles evil building owner Mrs. Crawford (Jo Helton) while falling in love with her niece Vicki (Molly Bee). Of course the adults are all cheering for the kids by the film's end.

The movie stands out because of the presence of Gene McDaniels, who sings instantly forgettable songs such as "I'm Mad" instead of his hits. McDaniels actually has a few lines of dialogue as well. Because the film was released during the folk music hootenanny craze of 1963, the Sherwood Singers croon lots of folk favorites including "Greenback Dollar". Molly Bee went on to a modest musical career, and Lauren starred in the infamous "The Crawling Hand" and the western "Law of the Lawless" before disappearing from the movie scene. (He made some minor news with his 2007 suicide in California.) Because of its cast "The Young Swingers" is actually a small step up from Dexter's usual films, faint praise though that is.