PALM SPRINGS WEEKEND: it's a white bread world out there

So this is how American teenagers celebrated Spring Break in the years before they developed a fully fledged culture of their own.
If PALM SPRINGS WEEKEND is to be believed America's youth in the early 1960s seized this long weekend away from the responsibilities of university and work to let rip and behave like a bunch of boisterous future accountants and housewives.
Some went so crazy they even loosened their tie before chugging their glass a milk.

Thankfully for the reputation of the babyboomers now nearing retirement PALM SPRINGS WEEKEND is less a documentary style snapshot of life in 1963 America and more an indicator of how out of touch Hollywood was with youth culture.
Directed by a 64 year old Norman Taurog, a veteran of almost 180 films dating back to 1926, the film was a break from his main task in the 1960s - that of emasculating Elvis Presley (he'd already directed 'GI Blues', 'Blue Hawaii', 'It Happened at the World's Fair' and 'Girls Girls Girls!' and there were another 5 titles still to come).
And what he did to Elvis with those flimsy travelogues and ridiculous musical comedies, he also did to the youth of America in PALM SPRINGS WEEKEND. Ostensibly a celebration of teenage hormones it's actually about as pheremonally charged as a white sliced loaf. Despite several daring uses of the word 'sex' no one comes anywhere close to indulging in any. Emotionally the characters are still trapped in pre-pubescence, convincing themselves they've fallen deeply in love after a brief first date and agonising about how they'll survive when he returns to Los Angeles and she goes back to her job in the Palm Springs record store.
Not only does writer Earl Hamner (who also created 'The Waltons') fail to grasp the reality of teenage sexuality but he also completely neuters that other trademark of 60s youth culture - the music. While real-life teenagers were sending Little Stevie Wonder, The Four Seasons, The Chiffons and Jan and Dean to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 in 1963, the faux teens (all the wrong side of 20) on the Warners backlot were singing "Bye Bye Blackbird" and dancing the Twist to the vocal stylings of The Modern Folk Quartet. To be fair, they dance The Twist to every piece of music played in the film, whether it's a folk song or a popular standard of the 1920s.
This is youth culture as envisaged by a bunch of 60 year old corporate suits clinging to the values of 1950s Eisenhower America. Their white bread vision of the world extends to the cast, all of whom are interchangeable both in looks and talent. Troy Donahue, Ty Hardin and Robert Conrad display not an ounce of personality, while the girls - Connie Stevens and Stefanie Powers - are similarly one dimensional. And don't get me started on Jerry Van Dyke - Dick's younger brother - who provides the comic relief. Let's just say he less amusing than an exploding car full of circus clowns.
Not only is the cast and the world they inhabit white bread it's also resolutely white. The college basketball team that Donahue, Van Dyke and their chums play for includes not a single African American, nor is there a Black, Asian or Latino face to be seen anywhere in the film.
Not so much escapist as delusional, PALM SPRINGS WEEKEND paints a picture of a youth culture that never really existed and thankfully was about to be swept away by the British Invasion and the rise of 60s counter-culture.

SUSAN SLADE: so-so soaper studies sex and the single virgin

It really is redundant to describe the plot of a soap as implausible and ridiculous so I'll settle for calling SUSAN SLADE a turgid viewing experience.
It starts out frothily enough with the Slade family, dad Roger (Lloyd Nolan), mum Leah (Dorothy McGuire) and their naive, virginal teenage daughter Susan (Connie Stevens) returning to California after 10 years in Chile's Atacama Desert where dad has been overseeing a mining operation for the uber-wealthy Corbett family (headed by Brian Aherne). On board the liner taking them home the shy and insecure Susan finds herself ardently pursued by the handsome hunk in the next cabin. Conn White (Grant Williams) is not only a chiseled dreamboat, he's also an avid mountaineer with a passion for 'conquering virgin peaks', Miss Slade included.
By the time their boat docks in San Francisco Susan is not only secretly engaged but also knocked-up, so when Conn is killed shortly afterwards in a climbing accident the Slades are faced with an appalling dilemma. What are they going to do with their unwed pregnant daughter? To admit her condition is unthinkable. This is, after all 1961, and decent people with wealthy friends just don't do that kind of thing. So they make the far more rational decision to move to Guatemala where Susan can give birth out of sight and grandma Leah can pretend the baby is hers.
So far so good.

Then the story becomes bogged down with plotlines involving a horse given to Susan as a birthday present and a stuttering romance with stable owner Hoyt Brecker (Troy Donahue). Hoyt's less chiseled than Conn but considerably taller (he almost has to get down on his knees to kiss Susan). He wears a red, Jan Dean style, windcheater but that's as rebellious as he gets. When he's not grooming horses he's writing books, and he's so sensitive that at times he comes across as barely less feminine than Susan. He's solid and dependable and Susan is going to be utterly bored with him within a year or two of marriage.
SUSAN SLADE's main point of interest for me is it's efforts to straddle two cultures - that of the staid, respectable, patriarchal 50s where success was measured by how far up the corporate ladder one can ascend, and the more liberated youth oriented 60s where teenagers turned their back on their parents values in favour of free love and uncoupling happiness from material acquisition. Screenwriter and director Delmer Daves tries to have it both ways with the tale he tells but his sympathies are clearly with the status quo.
It's a little sad to see old timers like McGuire, Nolan, Brian Aherne and Kent Smith slumming it in such a trashy production (and playing second fiddle to Stevens and Donahue), but I'm sure they were grateful for the work. I'm not so sure that McGuire would have been grateful for Daves' hamfisted efforts to endow her close-ups with a veneer of youth. They're shot through such thick filters that her face resembles a moving smear on the camera lens.
Neither a superior soap nor a top tier tearjerker, SUSAN SLADE is nothing more than industrial strength corn. Consume it at your peril.