Tagged: Lifeguard

Sam Elliott’s Aloha Shirt in Lifeguard

Sam Elliott in Lifeguard (1976)

Vitals

Sam Elliott as Rick Carlson, charismatic 32-year-old beach lifeguard

Southern California, Summer 1975

Film: Lifeguard
Release Date: July 23, 1976
Director: Daniel Petrie
Wardrobe Credit: Margo Baxley

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

Before his magnificent mustache and gravely voice made him a mainstay of Westerns, Sam Elliott’s breakthrough performance was in the romantic drama Lifeguard, released fifty years ago today on July 23, 1976.

In the half-century since its release, Lifeguard continues to polarize audiences as some praise it as a thoughtful character stufy of American masculinity in crisis while others disregard it as a vapid endorsement of statutory rape. While my own response falls somewhere in between, I do agree with even the film’s detractors that Sam Elliott’s undeniable charisma can’t help but to shine through even the more problematic elements of Ron Koslow’s screenplay. As the filmmakers cycled through potential leads like Beau Bridges and Adam Roarke, Elliott was considered after director Dan Petrie and his wife Dorothea noticed the actor’s masculine yet mustache-less performance opposite Roarke in the 1972 eco-horror film Frogs.

A former lifeguard himself, Elliott stars as a career lifeguard Rick Carlson working the beaches of Los Angeles County, where his easy-go-lucky barefoot life picking up chicks is washed into an identity crisis after he receives an invitation to his 15-year high school reunion while also countering his father (George D. Wallace) constantly criticizing his vocation: “You know what’s crazy? I still wonder what you’re gonna be when you grow up!” Although swayed by the promise of more “acceptable” success selling Porsches in the Valley, Rick ultimately decides to continue his sun-baked career as a professional lifeguard, having honed his abilities to the point where the only drowning allowed on his beach is drowning in tail. Continue reading →

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World: Dick Shawn’s Red Dodge Dart and Beach Duds

Dick Shawn as Sylvester Marcus in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963)

Vitals

Dick Shawn as Sylvester Marcus, impulsive lifeguard

Southern California, Summer 1962

Film: It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
Release Date: November 7, 1963
Director: Stanley Kramer
Costume Designer: Bill Thomas

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

I like to spend a week every summer exploring the intersection of costumes and cars as they define characters on screen. For this year’s first Car Week post, I’m revisiting a sentimental favorite: the 1963 slapstick comedy It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World with its sprawling cast of the era’s most recognizable comic actors from Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, and Buddy Hackett to Ethel Merman, Mickey Rooney, and Dick Shawn.

The latter is introduced later in the daylong pursuit of $350,000 stashed under a “big W” by the late Smiler Grogan (Jimmy Durante), portraying beach lifeguard Sylvester Marcus, described by his brother-in-law J. Russell Finch (Berle) as “an irresponsible, unreliable, big loudmouth, no-good bum who, if he isn’t a crook, it’s only because he hasn’t got the brains or ambition to even become a crook.”

Finch and his wife Emeline (Dorothy Provine) are traveling with her overbearing mother, Mrs. Marcus (Ethel Merman), whose relentless nagging during their search for the buried loot finally pushes Finch over the edge. The resulting blow-up leaves Emeline and her mother to fend for themselves, but—knowing she can count on her hopelessly devoted son—Mrs. Marcus calls Sylvester to send him ahead of them to Santa Rosita to find the loot.

Unfortunately for her quick payday, Sylvester’s sole brain cell is distracted somewhere between a beer and a bikini-clad brunette. Distracted by his mother’s description of Finch’s “assault”, Sylvester leaps into action and into the brunette’s shining red Dodge Dart convertible, tearfully determined to rescue his mother and sister without actually having listened to why they called him in the first place. Continue reading →