C'mon, Let's Live a Little

I was a high school senior in 1967 and this movie is a fantasy of that era if there ever was one. Bobby Vee was a pretty good singer back in the day, and I like listening to his music, but he could forget about being an actor. He was as terrible in this as the movie itself. This movie made the 'Frankie & Annette' movies look like best movie Oscar winners!

'Art pour l'art' may be a french way of saying that all art is worthy by its very existence, but this film may give future viewers a distorted view of life in the 1960's. I think that the movie is so bad that it is interesting to watch. Bobby Vee's straw hat is a fashion statement in itself---one that didn't catch on, I might add. The year 1967 was a difficult one for the United States with war, urban riots, and voting rights struggles, yet this film must represent what Richard Nixon would later refer to as the "great silent majority" in America: really nice kids arguing about what kind of events should be allowed on a small college campus. Should students be allowed to speak out on the issues of the day? Not if it involves topics that the administration of the campus finds provocative. If the "Miranda rights" an accused presently enjoys were overturned and coercive measures could be used by law enforcement, it wouldn't be necessary to use physical means to gain a "confession" from a suspect. Merely tie the accused to a chair and play this film on a loop for a few hours. Case closed!

Here is one of the many teeny-bopper flicks from the 1960's, that's so bad yet at the same time, fun to watch! The first time I saw this movie was on tv in 1982 when I was 14 years old. 22 years later in 2004 I watched it again on the "American Movie Classics" channel. I forgot how corny this movie really was! All about this hillbilly hick from the Ozarks who comes to California to enroll in college. Then sings himself into popularity on the college campus! Lots of singing and dancing!

This was the last thing directed by David Butler, who'd done a lot of TV in recent years but earlier had made a lot of good major-studio features including prime vehicles for Janet Gaynor, Shirley Temple and Doris Day. This film purportedly had budget problems, and it's easy to see that it was probably not a great experience for anyone, least of all Butler, who was over 70 at the time and was clearly not the guy to make a mid-60s teen musical. At best, the movie feels like a mediocre television episode of the time; at worst, it's the "rock" equivalent of such bottom-barrel country music movies at the time as "Las Vegas Hillbillys" and "Hillbillys in a Haunted House."

The print I saw was about 13 minutes shorter than the official original runtime, and I assume several songs got cut, since the first one doesn't turn up until nearly half an hour in, after which point they're almost incessant. The music is perfectly decent-Vee and DeShannon were fine singers, if not much as actors-even though the songs here are hardly memorable. But everything else pretty much blows, from the godawful comedy relief (poor Patsy Kelly and Eddie Hodges) to the utterly stupid plot engine of a terribly clean-cut campus "rebel" calling for "complete freedom," which both the dean and the movie seem to think is a terrible idea. This is a movie too afraid to do more than hint at politics, while suggesting that they are Bad. Real, wholesome youth don't have any ideas or issues on their minds!! Yeesh, even the same year's "The Cool Ones" was less antiquated.

Even as fluff, this movie is airheaded-at least the equally silly beach party movies knew not to meddle with campus protest and such. Throwing everything but the kitchen sink in, there's a "flubber"-type subplot involving a wacky scientific-inventor kid (Hodges). There's also some "hillbilly" relatives who show up for five minutes, then disappear. Needless to say, the only things that have any value here are the music and the occasional go-go dancing, and the underwhelming climax from "The Pair Extraordinarire" really does suggest they ran out of money during production--surely the movie intended to end with a slightly bigger bang. Others have claimed "C'mon" is a potential camp classic (a la "The Cool Ones," which is MUCH more fun), but really, it's too lame for that.

This corny 1967 film could yet earn itself a serious camp following. I stumbled onto seeing it and thought it must date from the late '50s. Boy was I wrong. It was shocking that someone in Hollywood actually made something like this in 1967. It comes off like they were still trying to save "mainstream" (read white) American youth from the dangers of soul and r&b music and such. Much in this movie seems to fit in well with today's full throttle attempts to throw (not turn) back the clock. Jackie De Shannon, Bobby Vee (whom I don't remember except the name), and also singer Kim Carnes who made this one film appearance. As an American in and from the Upper South I did not find that this film offends the South. It offends everyone in it. Actually one has to brace oneself for its backasswards gender attitudes expressed by some of the guys. Without giving everything away I'm left guessing that (stereotypically) the tail-end of this film (the cinematic equivalent of "the back of the bus") seems to advocate nonverbally the existence of Equal Opportunity Corniness. Some critics have dismissed this poor film as a bomb. They're right. But there's much more to it than that which makes it worth seeing. ... a jaw-dropping, side-splitting, cautionary reality check on today's societal resurrection of the whitebread past.