PALM SPRINGS WEEKEND: Retro Heaven or Hell?

 PALM SPRING WEEKEND, recently released on DVD, is a cultural artifact from that odd transitional period between the 1950s and the psychedelic onslaught of the late 60s, a brief interlude when the Beatles were barely a blip on the national radar, and folkish groups like the Brothers 4 and the Highwaymen still had hit singles on the charts.

The film is really a Warner Bros. version of one of those AIP beach party movies, without the beach, of course, and with a WB budget. The cast is mostly the studio’s entries in the “youth” sweepstakes of the era and includes Troy Donahue, fresh from a smash debut in another WB socio-sexual epic, A SUMMER PLACE, Connie Stevens, Jerry Van Dyke, and Stephanie Powers as a quartet of (allegedly) teenagers bent on having a wild weekend in that desert Shangra La of the ‘50s, Palm Springs.

Donahue plays an LA medical student on a basketball scholarship who accompanies the team on a rowdy spring break in Palm Springs, the Fort Lauderdale of the desert. Poor Troy has been much reviled, including this quote from “The Warner Bros. Story” noting that he “played Parrish in so stiff-jointed a manner that what he needed to guide him through his lines was an osteopath rather than a director….” But after the success of A SUMMER PLACE WB definitely pushed his career with a series of glossy melodramas, PARRISH, SUSAN SLADE, ROME ADVENTURE, several of which are included in this WB “Romance” boxed set, and he became such an icon of the period that he’s even mentioned in the lyrics of GREASE.

The plot moves along with few surprises, moving to quick action sequence when a “swinging” party - swinging with some of the most self-conscious twisting on film - is invaded by some of the wimpiest looking leather boys on record.

As a “sympathetic” nice girl pretending to be something she’s not Connie Stevens never manages to look more than cheap, though from the comments on IMBD she certainly did it for many males of the period. (Frankly she manages to look much much classier in her guest appearance in that under rated homage to the Beach Party genre, BACK TO THE BEACH, filmed about twenty years later). The somewhat sluttish Connie does have the film’s dramatic highpoint when she’s rather routinely attacked on a parking lot by the film’s heavy, a neurotic rich boy with a father fixation. However, the scene is quickly dispatched and lacks the high dramatic peak of, say, Yvette Mimeux’s traumatic pregnancy in WHERE THE BOYS ARE.

          Special mention should be made of Bill Mumy as Boom Boom, the “Dennis the Menace” son of the proprietress of the Inn where all the goings on are happening (or not happening as the case may be). Boom Boom’s droll and always welcome appearances are usually accompanied by quietly understated suggestions of the "Shower Murder" music cue from PSYCHO, and are an example of how pervasively the Alfred Hitchcock shocker had ironically invaded the complacent national consciousness of this period. This Bernard Herrmann quote may also be the first of many such “hommage” to appear in soundtracks over ensuing decades. The multi-talented and personable Mumy/Boom Boom went on to a successful and varied career in writing, television, and music.

And speaking of the soundtrack, Troy Donahue actually sings (?) the title tune. I guess WB thought if Tab Hunter could have hit records, why not Troy? (One listen to the Main Title will provide a quick answer to that question). 
Another amusing sequence is the scene in the music shop in which all of the records are Warner Bros. LPs. This scene also includes a large, prominently placed display ad for the soundtrack to THE MUSIC MAN, the film released by WB the previous year.

I was disappointed that you don’t get to see more of the real Palm Springs - whatever that is - in the movie. The film shifts between desert location footage and the WB soundstage and at one point, in the scene outside the casino, Donahue and Powers look like they've wandered onto the set of IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE. Still, like WHERE THE BOYS ARE and GET YOURSELF A COLLEGE GIRL, the clothes, dance moves, and cars provide a more than authentic Hollywood evocation of an odd period in American pop culture.

         Aside from all the fascinating sociological underpinnings PALM SPRINGS WEEKEND is also an entertaining time trip back to the days of the twist and forty-foot long convertibles. It also has its moments of genuinely funny, almost nostalgic slapstick humor, particularly from the “adults” in the cast, notably Jack Weston as the fussy, lascivious coach and Carole Cook as the motel concierge.   While it could be seen as a harbinger of the future more far out ‘60s, no one really swings yet. The film’s bad boy may toast “sex” but  never actually has it, and indeed the irony of PSW, like most of the era’s “swinging” youth films, is that they’re ostensibly all about sex while nobody in them actually has any. Ultimately PALM SPRINGS WEEKEND staunchly adheres to the “won’t go to bed till I’m legally wed” 1950s moral code that the tougher and more gritty stage version of GREASE would skewer so well and definitively several short decades later.

But it’s still almost poignant fun and those cars are surely to die for.