Spring Break

“The city of Fort Lauderdale is once again under fire from the North.”

- Chill Wills as the Fort Lauderdale, Florida, police captain in “Where the Boys Are” (1960)

“In Fort Lauderdale, Fla., spring is greeted with an extra force of cops. This year, to welcome up properly, the lawmen set up a satellite police station squarely on the ocean beach. The fortification did not do much good…spring-vacationing collegians who began taking over the town two weekends ago behaved in the same sun-struck, beer-propelled way as have their predecessors…That is, they grilled themselves medium-rare all day, beach-boozed all night, and blew the foam off the early hours by decanting sand sharks and alligators into local swimming pools.” Sound familiar? Actually, that snippet of newsy prose, titled “Beer & the Beach,” was published well over a half century ago in the April 13, 1959 edition of Time magazine.

Fifty years later, in the March 30, 2009 issue of the same magazine, in a piece called “A Brief History of Spring Break," Lauren Bohn wrote, “Blame the debauchery on those hedonistic Greeks and Romans. The arrival of spring, the season of fertility and awakening, was historically celebrated in tandem with the veneration of Dionysus or Bacchus – the Greek and Roman gods of wine.”

 

17th-century French Baroque artist Nicolas Poussin captures the
essence of spring fever in his painting "Bacchanal before a Herm."

Historically, according to Bohn, “more immediate responsibility…lies with a swimming coach at Colgate University.” In 1936, Sam Ingram, the swimming coach at the Hamilton Village college in mid-state New York, was concerned that his team would get out of shape over Christmas break. A student’s father, who lived in Fort Lauderdale, suggested the team train at that city’s Olympic-sized Casino Pool, which had opened in 1928. This first group of northern school kids received a warm welcome from the locals.

 

A vintage postcard depicts the Casino Pool in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

In 1938, recognizing the economic opportunity, Fort Lauderdale hosted the first College Coaches’ Swim Forum at the Casino Pool, and it wasn’t long before more than 300 swimmers were competing at the event, and, in the words of Lauren Bohn, “a bacchanal was born.” By 1954, an estimated multitude of 20,000 college students migrated to the coastal community, establishing Fort Lauderdale as the unofficial Spring Break capital of the U.S.

 

Decades before wet t-shirt contests and binge drinking, and MTV, a chorus line of
bathing beauties dances on the sands of a Florida beach during spring break.

The 1959 Time article, aptly nestled in the magazine’s “Education” page, offered, “No one is quite sure why the unleashed scholars establish their beachhead each year at Fort Lauderdale – an East Coast resort of 63,000 with a perceptible percentage of retired oldsters…The townspeople regard the invasion with edgy amusement: student-watching has become a local sport.” The piece concluded with one girl questioned why she made the migration: “This is where the boys are.”

That phrase led to the title of the 1960 coming-of-age comedy-drama “Where the Boys Are,” the first motion picture devoted to the spring break phenomenon, centering on the (s)exploits of four friends from a snowbound Midwestern women’s college who carpool to Fort Lauderdale on their spring vacation. The screenplay was very loosely based on a recent novel of the same name by Glendon Swarthout, an instructor of freshman honors English at Michigan State University who would later write The Shootist, which inspired John Wayne’s final motion picture. 

 

In a typical scene from "Where the Boys Are," a bunch of rowdy revelers are
asked by cops to "move" their stalled sportscar. The movie's script virtually
repeated verbatim a line from a Notre Dame senior quoted in the 1959 Time
magazine article "Beer & the Beach" - "It's not that we drink so much. It's
just that we drink all the time." 

In his 2008 memoir Don’t Mind If I Do, George Hamilton, who was 21 when he played richie-rich Ivy Leaguer Ryder Smith in “Where the Boys Are,” noted, “What interested the studio was the racy subtext of a college girl getting knocked up.”

Dolores Hart ill-advisedly compares tans with
"Where the Boys Are" costar George Hamilton.

George Hamilton’s “Where the Boys Are” costar and love interest was played by Dolores Hart, a rising star in Hollywood who, in her film debut, gave Elvis Presley his first screen kiss in “Loving You” (1957). (Before Dolores Hart was cast, the filmmakers considered a young Jane Fonda for the role.) Hollywood gossip columnist Sidney Skolsky heralded Hart as “the Junior Miss Princess Grace.” After starring in “Come Fly With Me” in 1963, Hart abruptly turned her back on show business and became a nun at the Benedictine Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut, where she eventually became Prioress of the Monastery.

Hart’s character in “Where the Boys Are,” the brainy Merritt Andrews, is the most open-minded of the quartet of vacationing females. She finds herself in hot water with the university dean when she addresses her Courtship and Marriage classmates with her opinions on “interpersonal relationships.” “What could be more interpersonal than backseat bingo?” she asks. “Why don’t we get down to the giant jackpot issue? Should a girl or should she not under any circumstances play house before marriage?...My opinion is yes.”

In an interview on the occasion of the movie’s 30^th anniversary, the Reverend Mother Dolores Hart (incidentally, the only nun to be an Oscar-voting member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) maintained she always thought of “Where the Boys Are” as a “message film.” She said, “From the first reading of the script, I felt it took a strong moral tone, which was passed on to its youthful audience in a comedic way. Teenage girls, especially, could find something to think about as they struggled with personal relationship puzzles, and most of the ‘message’ lines were spoken by my character…a liberal-thinking but strongly moral student.”

Director Henry Levin liked to oversee a happy set and believed that if the cast liked each other, that amity would come across on the screen. Mother Dolores Hart recalled, “ ‘Where the Boys Are’ was a very good experience for all of us at a time in our country’s life when we trusted our innocence and believed in the meaning of lasting friendships. That is the one lingering memory I have of that film - that we all did become friends.”

Some cast members were convinced Levin was romantically attracted to Hart. She has remained mum on the subject but did say, “All I know is I got a lot of close-ups.” Coincidentally, Levin directed Hart in her final picture, the aforementioned “Come Fly With Me,” kind of a sky-bound “Where the Boys Are” with stewardesses.

 

Paula Prentiss, Dolores Hart, Yvette Mimieux, Connie Francis
pose in a publicity photo for "Where the Boys Are."

Coming toward the end of movie censorship by the Hays Office, “Where the Boys Are” was one of the first adolescent-targeted films to explore - comedically and admittedly melodramatically – premarital sex and the changing mores and attitudes among college youth. According to George Hamilton, “What also interested (the studio) was that they had all these young actors on contract whom they could plug into this quickie for a very low budget, people like Paula Prentiss…Yvette Mimieux, Dolores Hart, Jim Hutton, and yours truly.”

Discovered by a talent scout at Northwestern University, Paula Prentiss made her screen debut in “Where the Boys Are” as the tall (5’ 10”), wisecracking Tuggle, who wishes, “All I want is to meet a boy with feet as big as mine.” When the carload of girls pulls over for a gangly, goofy hitchhiker nicknamed “TV” (played by 6’ 5” Jim Hutton), Tuggle asks, “How big are your feet?” TV replies, “Thirteen.” “Get in.”

Jim Hutton won't stop discussing sex with Paula Prentiss in
a soundstage replica of Fort Lauderdale's storied Elbo Room.

Prentiss and Hutton, who were paired onscreen because they were the tallest female and male actors under contract at MGM, make for a charming, kooky-cute couple and proved so popular with the public that the studio promptly paired them in three more comedies back-to-back: “Bachelor in Paradise” (1961), “The Honeymoon Machine” (1961), and “The Horizontal Lieutenant.” (1962). According to Prentiss, when audiences started to think they were married in real life, they decided to seek separate roles.

Ads like this only convinced moviegoers that
Paula Prentiss and Jim Hutton were a couple in real life.

MGM hoped to ensure the film’s success by “introducing” Connie Francis in a major role as one of the vacationing girls, the perky Angie. Francis, who, at the time, was the top American female singer and a member of MGM Records roster, was reluctant to make a movie, but producer Joe Pasternak’s persistence ultimately swayed her, and she also performed the film’s hit theme song. Written by Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield, who had already written a number of hit songs for her, “Where the Boys Are” peaked on the charts at #4 and became her signature tune.

On the screen, Francis hooks up with Frank Gorshin (a scene-stealing comedic actor best known as The Riddler on the 1960s TV series “Batman”) as a myopic, pompous, “dialectic jazz” musician named Basil who calls Angie “Short One,” chastises her for speaking "jive" in his presence, and informs her, “You may put rosin on my bow.” Accompanied by his combo, Connie Francis takes the spotlight singing the bouncy ditty “Turn on the Sunshine,” another Sedaka-Greenfield composition.

 

Connie Francis "rosins" Frank Gorshin's bow in "Where the Boys Are."

“Where the Boys Are,” according to George Hamilton, “would become a cult and camp classic, thanks in large part to Connie Francis.” Francis subsequently starred in a couple of trifling, less successful outings, “Follow the Boys” (with “Where the Boys Are” costar Paula Prentiss) and “When the Boys Meet the Girls,” neither one, despite their titles, related to her breakthrough film.

Fort Lauderdale hosted the star-studded world premiere of “Where the Boys Are,” with city mayor Edward Johns greeting the cast at the airport. “Where the Boys Are” became MGM’s highest-grossing picture of 1961. The movie also inspired 50,000 (two-and-a-half times previous numbers) to descend on Fort Lauderdale for their annual spring break.

This 1962 photo captures a Fort Lauderdale scene during spring break.

By 1981, melees among students became standard calls for police (recalling police chief Chill Wills’ then-lighthearted pep talk to his troops in “Where the Boys Are” about the “war against higher education”), and hundreds were jailed. During the ‘80s, Fort Lauderdale’s Candy Store lounge was the epicenter of bikini contests and wet t-shirt competitions.

In 1984, Allan Carr, a flamboyant, over-the-top Hollywood schmoozer, produced the in-name-only remake “Where the Boys Are ’84.” Carr was a marketing and promotion consultant for the 1975 film version of The Who’s rock opera “Tommy” who also supervised the ad campaign for “Saturday Night Fever” before establishing his own presence as the producer behind the hit movie musical “Grease” and the Tony Award-winning Broadway smash “La Cage aux Folles.” Carr’s Midas touch quickly turned to rust when he produced the disco kiss-of-death “Can’t Stop the Music,” teaming the ambiguous Village People with Steve Guttenberg, Valerie Perrine, and the ambiguous Bruce Jenner, followed by the unasked-for “Grease 2.”

 

"Where the Boys Are '84" starred Lisa Hartman, Lorna Luft (Liza Minnelli's
kid half-sister), Lynn-Holly Johnson, and Wendy Schaal (daughter of comedic
TV actor Richard Schaal, a familiar face on such MTM series of the '70s as "The
Mary Tyler Moore Show," "The BobNewhart Show," "Rhoda," and "Phyllis").
In a desperate attempt at suspension of disbelief, the filmmakers would have
the audience accept the 28-year-oldt Luft as the winner of a Hot Bod Contest!

“Where the Boys Are ‘84” was nominated for several Golden Raspberry Awards, including Worst Picture and Worst Screenplay. Bubbly Lynn-Holly Johnson, whose film debut as the promising figure skater stricken blind in 1978’s “Ice Castles” led to her breakthrough role as a virginal, horny “Bond Girl” in 1981’s “For Your Eyes Only,” starring Roger Moore, took home the Razzie for Worst Supporting Actress.

Allan Carr tried to entice original “Where the Boys Are” stars George Hamilton, Paula Prentiss, and Connie Francis to make cameo appearances (Jim Hutton had passed away in 1979), but they all wisely declined. At the least, Carr landed George Hamilton’s ex-wife, Alana Hamilton, for a supporting role.

Roger Ebert qualified the picture as “an exercise in exhausted cynicism,” proclaiming, “It isn’t a sequel and it isn’t a remake and isn’t, in fact, much of anything.”

By 1985, some 370,000 students were flocking yearly to Fort Lauderdale, nicknamed “Fort Liquordale.” Robert Dressler, mayor of the city from 1982 to 1986, appeared on ABC-TV’s “Good Morning America” to tell students they were no longer welcome there. His successor, Robert O. Cox, who was a city commissioner during what The New York Times writer Bill Marsh dubbed “the years of greatest mayhem,” recalled how jittery fellow commissioners voted to procure a riot tank with a water cannon to contend with student rampages. He was relieved that the tank never went into active service, but after he was elected mayor, streets were reconfigured to discourage cruising, laws on public drinking were strictly enforced, and long-standing icons of springtime bacchanalia were razed and replaced by high-end restaurants and hotels. It took until 2002 for city officials to demolish the previously mentioned Candy Store for construction of a luxury hotel.

(Top) Contestants particpate in the Teenie Weenie Bikini
Contest at Fort Lauderdale's late, great Candy Store;
(below) Fort Lauderdale's Elbo Room, prominently
featured in 1961's "Where the Boys Are," was built
in 1938, with a restaurant downstairs and a bar
upstairs. Unlike the Candy Store,  the Elbo Room was
not razed and reamins a people-watcher's heaven.

The city’s efforts worked (by 2005, an estimated 15,000 students visited Fort Lauderdale on spring break, down 95% from 1956), and the throngs were pushed south. In fact, by the late 1960s, marketing efforts by Daytona Beach, Florida, succeeded in luring over 100,000 spring breakers. In 1986, MTV sent cameras to Daytona Beach for the network’s first spring break broadcast, attracting nearly 400,000 students to the then reigning party capital. According to one internet writer, “Hordes of permed, mulleted kids in fluorescent Body Glove swimwear and B.U.M. Equipment hats descended on the Floridian town to watch performances by hair metal band Vixen, new wave act Squeeze and hip-hop studs The Beastie Boys,” not to mention Starship, with wimpy lead vocalist Mickey Thomas and an unhappy Grace Slick belting out “We Built This City” – co-written by Elton John’s frequent lyricist Bernie Taupin and voted the worst song of  the 1980s in a Rolling Stone magazine readers’ poll.

!n the meantime, other spring break destinations grew in popularity, including South Padre Island, Texas, the Caribbean, Cancun, Mexico (where the legal drinking age is 18), and Panama City, Florida (which, thanks to MTV’s help in the 2000s, became the undisputed Spring Break capital).

The AMA issued warnings of the dangers of binge-drinking and unsafe sex. “Such shenanigans,” in the words of Time magazine’s Lauren Bohn, became the well-practiced vocation for “spring break’s most controversial enthusiast: Joe Francis, the man behind the ‘Girls Gone Wild’ video series.” The raunchy videos of topless coeds made sleaze-maestro Francis a fortune, according to Bohn, “until an ill-advised shoot in Panama City, Florida, in 2003 led to Francis being jailed in a dispute over a civil suit that stemmed from the videotaping of underage girls.” Francis’ unending legal issues have subsequently bounced around in civil, state, federal, and bankruptcy courts.

In 1991, Sonny Bono (below), in his next-to-last year as mayor of the desert resort city of Palm Springs, California, banned the wearing of thongs in public. Not surprisingly, the city’s allure as a spring break destination suffered irreparably.

Speaking of Palm Springs, 1963 saw the release of “Palm Springs Weekend,” a “Where the Boys Are” goes West (right down to the movie poster declaring, “It’s where the boys are and the girls are”), starring Troy Donahue (a ‘50s teen heartthrob whose star was beginning to fade) as a member of a vacationing Los Angeles college basketball team (well, at least half of a team, in light of the film’s corner-cutting budget). The team’s martinet of a coach ends up on the same Palm Springs-bound bus for no reason other than an excuse to take advantage of the comic talents of veteran character actor Jack Weston.

 

Troy Donahue (who fancied himself a singer - he warbled the
film's opening titles song "Live Young") strikes a pose poolside
with costar Stefanie Powers and her almost-belly button.

Donahue falls for local record store cashier Stefanie Powers (best known as Robert Wagner’s costar in the 1980s TV series “Hart to Hart”), who - oh-oh! - happens to be the daughter of the desert community’s slow-burn chief of police Andrew Duggan (“Don’t panic…It’s the beginning of a gay week”), while Connie Stevens, playing a confused Hollywood High schooler (Stevens was 25 at the time) passing herself off as a college coed from Hawaii, finds herself pursued by vain rich playboy Robert Conrad (a couple years before he found uber-TV stardom in the series “The Wild Wild West”) and by humble movie stuntman Ty Hardin (another 1950s screen idol).

 

Alleged comic relief in "Palm Springs Weekend" is provided by fifth wheels
Jerry Van Dyke and Zeme North. Seemingly, if any producer hired Dick Van
Dyke's kid brother, that damn banjo came with the contract. (Left) He joins Ty
Hardin (as good ol' boy Hollywood stuntman Stretch Fortune) in a rousing,
poolside rendition of that teen favorite "Bye Bye Blackbird." (Right) Zeme
North, as the plain-Jane. perky roommate (every spring break or beach movie
had to have the "perky" roommate or best friend), shows Connie Stevens her
sure-fire technique for finding a boyfriend. If you haven't figured out that she
will inevitably hook up with Jerry Van Dyke, stop watching movies immediately.

(Robert Conrad and Connie Stevens had previously costarred on the ABC-TV detective series “Hawaiian Eye” from 1959 to 1963. Coincidentally, Troy Donahue joined the series in its final season as a hotel social director.)

 

A curtain call for "Palm Springs Weekend" brings together Troy Donahue,
Stefanie Powers, Ty Hardin, Connie Stevens, and Robert Conrad.

Directed by Norman Taurog, whose staggering résumé of 180 films includes six Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis comedies and nine Elvis Presley movies, and scripted by Earl Hamner Jr., the creator of TV’s “The Waltons,” “Palm Springs Weekend” devotes equal camera-time to real Palm Springs locations and phony Hollywood soundstages.

It was on such a closed set that impish Billy Mumy (the human monster of the classic 1961 “Twilight Zone” episode “It’s a Good Life”), playing the movie’s ginger-headed prankster - appropriately nicknamed “Boom-Boom” - instigated the flooding of a motel swimming pool with laundry detergent. “We got the only pool in town with a head on it!” he declares. In the ensuing, slapstick scene where the pool fills up with soap bubbles, several cast and crew members became physically ill from the fumes, forcing the set to be temporarily shut down. (Mumy, of course, went on to portray interplanetary castaway Will Robinson in “Lost in Space” and later, as half of the fictitious twin-brother duo Barnes and Barnes – with Robert Haimer – achieved cult music renown with the 1978 recording “Fish Heads.”)

Movies during the 1970s virtually ignored spring break, but in the wake of the surprising box-office bonanza of “National Lampoon’s Animal House” in 1978, moviemakers adopted (a polite term for “ripped off”) the successful slobs-vs.-snobs formula several times over (and continue  to do so nearly four decades later), and cameras returned to Palm Springs for “Fraternity Vacation” (1985), directed by James Frawley (“The Muppet Movie”) and featuring an early performance by Tim Robbins, as a gland-driven lunkhead named Larry “Mother”-Tucker. John Vernon effortlessly reprises his Dean Wormer characterization from “Animal House” as the town’s harried police chief.

“Don’t get me wrong,” critic Roger Ebert noted. “I have nothing against dumb sex comedies. All I object to is the fact that ‘Fraternity Vacation’ is playing with half a deck – the male half. The men are the characters and the women are the objects."

(Left) Perry Lang (second from right) clowns around with his "Spring Break"
costars - Lang, who had prominent roles in director Steven Spielberg's "1941,"
director Samuel Fuller's "The Big Red One," and director John Sayles' "Eight
Men Out" (as disgraced Chicago White Sox third baseman Fred McMullin),
became a successful TV director of such series as "Weeds," "Gilmore Girls,"
"Las Vegas," and "Everwood." (Right) Britt Ekland, in a cameo appearance,
appears to captivate "Fraternity Vacation" costars Tim Robbins, Cameron Dye,
and Stephen Geoffreys. (Geoffreys, who was best know for his roles as creepy
characters in "Fright Night," "976-EVIL," and "At Close Range," took a break
from mainstream cinema in the 1990s to star in guy-on-guy adult movies.

Old reliable Fort Lauderdale returned as the setting for “Spring Break” (1983), a low-budget comedy directed by Sean S. Cunningham (best known as the producer of the original “Last House on the Left” and the creator of the “Friday the 13^th” film series). In a picture populated by what Roger Ebert called “uninteresting male wimps and studs” who “view women only as wet t-shirt finalists,” the critic singled out actress Corinne Alphen (a Penthouse Pet of the Year and professional Tarot reader) for her “dazzling smile, a great personality and a relaxed naturalness on the screen that makes the horny teenage boys seem all the more gauche.” Ebert summed it up, “What a letdown for a horny movie critic.”

"Spring Break" costar Corrine Alphen poses with muscle-beach boys.

By 2006, several colleges, as well as MTV, were promoting community service as an alternative for students on spring break. Regions affected by Hurricane Katrina were especially popular, where students helped with cleanup and rebuilding efforts. That same year, New York state’s Colgate University, the originator of the spring migration, offered students “safe break bags,” containing sunscreen, antacid, ibuprofen, antiseptic ointment, condoms, and pamphlets on how to help friends who overindulge and how to avoid sexual assault, as well as what to do if assaulted.

Inevitably, the decade of the 2000s introduced elements of horror and cheesy CGI effects to spring break on the screen. The 2005 made-for-television flick “Spring Break Shark Attack,” though laughably set in Florida, was actually filmed on Cape Town, South Africa, locations.  Two otherwise respectable cast members who should have known better were Kathy Baker (three-time Emmy Award-winner for the ‘90s TV series “Picket Fences”) and acclaimed Australian actor Bryan Brown.

As mentioned above, the TV movie "Spring Break Shart Attack" was filmed in
South Africa, where, like Australia and most of South America, seasons are
topsy-turvy from ours - their winter is June through August, summer, Decemeber
to February. Nevertheless, Australia travel agencies still push Easter holiday,
even though it's fall, as spring break to attract international vacationers.

“Spring Break Massacre” (2008) was filmed in Illinois and Iowa with a no-name cast. At least “Girls Gone Dead” (2012) featured genuine Florida beach locations, not to mention cameos by adult movie legend Ron (“The Hedgehog”) Jeremy, former professional wrestler Jerry (“The King”) Lawler (as a sheriff), and Z-movie scream queen Linnea Quigley.

Lake Havasu in Arizona, an emerging hot spot for spring break crowds, was the setting for 2010’s “Piranha 3D” (above) a very funny, very bloody reboot of director Joe Dante’s cult favorite from 1978, “Piranha.” Co-writer-co-producer-director Alexandre Aja recruited the likes of Richard Dreyfuss (“Jaws” – no coincidence), Ving Rhames (the “Dawn of the Dead” remake), Elizabeth Shue (Oscar nominee for “Leaving Las Vegas”), Christopher Lloyd (Doc Brown in the “Back to the Future” films), and Jerry O’Connell (best known as the fat kid in “Stand by Me” who ended up marrying “X-Men’s” half-naked Rebecca Romijn) for a game, tongue-in-cheek cast in what critics and audiences greeted as a gleeful, gory, campy guilty pleasure.

Amber Tamblyn, Amy Poehler, and Rachel Dratch in "Spring Breakdown"

On the lighter side, “Saturday Night Live” alum Rachel Dratch wrote the story for and costarred in the 2009 comedy “Spring Breakdown,” a rerouted-to-DVD film featuring Amy Pohler, Parker Posey, Amber Tamblyn (Tibby in the “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” movies), Seth Meyers, and “Glee’s” Jane Lynch.

“Spring Breakers” (2012), written and directed by Harmony Korine, gave the vacation season a darkly comic twist in a sardonic thriller with James Franco (above) as a larcenous Svengali who entices a quartet of college students – Vanessa Hudgens, Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson, and Rachel Korine (Harmony’s wife) – to join him on a violent crime spree. The Huffington Post described the movie as “’Scarface’ meets Britney Spears.” Based on numerous reviews, the consensus on the website Rotten Tomatoes was, “ ‘Spring Breakers’ blends stinging social commentary with bikini cheesecake and a bravura James Franco performance.”

Currently awaiting a release date is “Spring Break ’83,” a comedy about college freshmen wreaking vengeance on former high school bullies, starring Jamie Kennedy and Alan Ritchson (Gloss in “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire”), with a supporting cast featuring Robert Davi, John Goodman, Erik Estrada, Morgan Fairchild, Lee Majors, Joe Pantoliano, Joe Piscopo, and Adrian Zmed.

However, when it comes to cinema celebrating the annual migratory behavior of hormone-frenzied collegians come the March equinox, we in the moviehouse reserve a special corner in our heart for the corny innocence of the pioneer spring break films of the 1960s, notably, of course, the previously discussed “Where the Boys Are” and “Palm Springs Weekend,” along with, last but certainly not least, the 1965 Elvis Presley’ musical-comedy “Girl Happy.”

Gary Crosby, Elvis Presley, Joby Baker (on drums), Jimmy Hawkins in "Girl Happy"

When the precocious daughter of an overprotective father heads to Fort Lauderdale with two of her college friends for spring break, daddy, who happens to be a Chicago mobster and nightclub owner named Big Frank, hires Rusty Wells (Elvis) and his swingin’ combo to keep an eye on his little girl, Valerie (Shelley Fabares). Rusty and the boys – Gary Crosby (Bing’s oldest son from his first marriage), Joby Baker, and Jimmy Hawkins – have their hands full keeping an amorous Italian away from Valerie while attempting to pursue their own spring break romances.

Mary Ann Mobley strikes a pose for a corny publicity photo.

Elvis particularly finds himself in a pickle chasing after a seductive beauty (Mary Ann Mobley, Miss America 1959) and then falling for Valerie. When his bandmates realize he has gone gaga over Big Frank’s little girl, they declare, “The king is dead!” (It was in 1956 when various journalists first referred to Presley as a “king of the teenage cats,” the “new king of the rock ‘n’ roll set,” and “the fledgling king of rock ‘n’ roll.”)

Speaking of schmaltzy publicity pictures, Shelley Fabares (center) and her
"Girl Happy" roommates Lynn Edgington and Chris Noel storm the beach.

One reviewer dubbed “Girl Happy” “a beach party movie without a beach.” There’s something phony going on here. None of the scenes with the cast were filmed in Fort Lauderdale. The claustrophobic sequences set in the poolside motel and various nightclubs were shot at MGM studios in Hollywood, and the handful of beach scenes were photographed in southern California. Some of the beach crowd footage was actually lifted from “Where the Boys Are,” which, like “Girl Happy,” was produced by Joe Pasternak. In his autobiography, “Where the Boys Are” star George Hamilton referred to Pasternak as a “schlockmeister…who was pretty much the hoodlum priest in MGM’s College of Cardinals.” According to Hamilton, “Joe was bargain basement and proud of it. But he was a moneymaker.”

Another puzzler here is that although Elvis was physically in his prime at the time – tall and lean – and had been filmed bare-chested in a number of previous movies, throughout “Girl Happy,” he inexplicably never appears without a long-sleeved shirt, even when water-skiing.

Shelley Fabares and Elvis Presley prove that one can never don enough outerwear
when pretending to water-ski on a Hollywood set passing as Fort Lauderdale.

 The soundtrack features a dozen of the most forgettable tunes Elvis ever recorded, including the embarrassing “Do the Clam,” a plea for a would-be dance craze that, thankfully, never caught on. (The song was co-written by Dolores Fuller, best known as worst-director-of-all-time Ed Wood’s former girlfriend and frequent costar in his films).

As alluded to earlier, the popularity of spring break started going international with an annual migration of American college students to Cancun, Mexico, but the phenomenon has gone global. Would you believe ads that proclaim “Croatia is the New Spring Break 2014 Party Destination!”?

On the island of Pag in the northern Adriatic Sea, most tourists, who travel from Croatia, Hungary, Italy, Germany, France, and Austria, stay in the town of Novaljia (population 3660 or so), two kilometers from the well-known Zrce Beach, which features all-hour discotheques and beach bars during the spring and summer months. Umag, a coastal city on the peninsula of Istria in Croatia, is another spring break favorite.

In fact, throughout Europe, where lower drinking ages (and the lack of enforcement otherwise) attract international visitors, beaches in Bulgaria, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, and Spain have become popular spring break destinations. On the other hand, it looks as if China has a way to go in the competition to draw college crowds during spring break…

"It's spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you've got it, you want - oh, you don't quite know what it is you do want - but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!"
- Mark Twain