Get Yourself A College Girl Who Thinks Young!

Well.

Between listening to Gene Pitney this morning and watching the Dave Clark Five and the Animals this afternoon, we’re all about the American pop culture thing, specifically the American pop culture movie, circa 1964.

The older we get though, the more we find we have to be in the proper mood, or something like that, to sit through this kind of movie. As entertainment goes, sixties pop movies are not exactly… well, they’re not exactly anything, exactly.

Get Yourself a College Girl, for example, plays as a pastiche of a bunch of things, obviously taking its swingin’ gals on the prowl look and tone from predecessors like 1960’s Where the Boys Are and the more popular beach party flicks of the era. If you are in the right frame of mind for it, College Girl is hilarious, albeit mindless, fun.

If you’re not… it’s awful, really it is. Cute little Republican-soccer-mom-to-be Mary Ann Mobley as a coed sex-bomb “liberating” her peers with her “sophisticated, sexy” songs? Please. Seriously. Stop.

And then there’s For Those Who Think Young, yet another variation on campus musical/ beach blanket bikini hijinks, also from ’64, this one starring—you can assume we’re using that word very loosely here—sixties hunk muffin James Darren as Gardiner Pruitt III, nicknamed—we swear we are not making this up—“Ding-a-Ling” or “Ding” to his intimates, and the wholesome and sultry Pamela Tiffin as the coed Ding digs. We don’t recall her character’s name just now but be assured that doesn’t matter much here; this is the sixties after all and she’s just a chick, you dig? Young also co-stars Nancy “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” Sinatra as Tiffin’s respectable and demurely brunette best friend and—get out—a blonde Ellen Burstyn (appearing in the cast listing as Ellen McRae) as an upright, uptight arbiter of campus morals with a bod that won’t quit who eventually learns to loosen up and get with it. Of course she does.

We should mention that the amusing Bob Denver, still in full Maynard G. Krebs mode, is on hand as Sinatra’s bearded boyfriend, and that wonderfully snarky Paul Lynde plays, well, he plays Paul Lynde—not that we’d have it any other way. Also we thought we recognized the dependable Allan Jenkins somewhere in the proceedings as a kind of hipster-fogie crony—okay, yeah, but we can’t figure any other way to describe him—of Darren-Ding’s wealthy, disapproving grandpa, played with appropriate gruff by Robert Middleton, who has surely seen better days in fifties movies like Love Me Tender, The Desperate Hours and The Court Jester, movies we frankly liked a whole lot better than this one.

And, saaaay-- isn’t that the impossibly glamorous Tina “Ginger” Louise as campus bombshell-stripper and closet intellectual Topaz McQueen, over there with Golden Era tough guy George Raft and 77 Sunset Strip’s debonair Roger Smith, both of whom appear here as determined G-men or some such? Ye-es. We'd have to double-check, but we think it was not long after this film’s release that Smith decided to give up the acting, marry Ann-Margret, and concentrate his energies on managing her career. We shouldn’t wonder.

It’s probably unfair to expect much from movies like this; still, you kind of do. You sense that, when done properly, and with some verve, sixties flicks are a fun, frothy treat and not at all a bad way to spend a lazy Sunday afternoon, no matter what our mom says.

Think Oliver Reed and a shockingly young Michael Crawford in the romp, The Jokers; think The Beatles in Help! and the superior A Hard Day’s Night; think Lynn Redgrave and Rita Tushingham in the knockabout Smashing Time; think Frankie and Annette in the agreeably silly Beach Blanket Bingo, for goodness sakes.

When they’re not done well, when they’re slapped together and rushed out there, the better to jump on the youth movement bandwagon while the wheels are still attached, you cringe with disappointment. You wince and smirk and wince some more as you watch yet another mid-sixties “youth movie” that is nothing of the sort—everything about the way these “kids” talk, move, and look, the boys spit-polished and clean-cut in suits and ties, the babes elaborately coiffed and coyly demure in Evan-Picone and sensible heels, betray establishment Hollywood’s totally clueless notions about the New Youth. The supposedly swingin’ soundtracks of Get Yourself a College Girl and For Those Who Think Young are (mostly) painfully generic muzak that studio suits apparently convinced themselves was reasonably representative of righteous rock and roll, though this was—we’re pinching ourselves—the very same year that Motown, the Beach Boys, The Rolling Stones and the aforementioned Beatles Ate America.

Call this the “Velveeta Revolution,” a blonde, bland, blah offensively inoffensive, pre-fab youth rebellion for a Goldwater Middle-America.

Or call it—oh, screw it; you know by now where we’re going with this.

Wonder if “Gilligan’s Island” is on?