Beach Blanket Bingo ** (1965, Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello, Deborah Walley, Harvey Lembeck, Linda Evans, Paul Lynde, Don Rickles) – Classic Movie Review 11,446

“These kids are nuts.” Frankie (Frankie Avalon) takes up skydiving, prompting Dee Dee (Annette Funicello) also to try free-falling, in the 1965 fifth beach party film Beach Blanket Bingo.

Director William Asher’s 1965 American International Pictures beach party film Beach Blanket Bingo is the fifth of seven films in the Beach Party film series aimed at a teen audience. It stars Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello, Deborah Walley, Harvey Lembeck, Linda Evans, Paul Lynde, Don Rickles, along with Earl Wilson and Buster Keaton.

Linda Evans plays singer Sugar Kane, after Nancy Sinatra dropped out as the plot involved a kidnapping, when the evil South Dakota Slim (Timothy Carey) kidnaps Sugar Kane and ties her to a buzz-saw, a plot reminiscent of her brother Frank Sinatra Jr’s kidnapping a few months before shooting began. Evans’s singing voice is dubbed by Jackie Ward.

Frankie (Frankie Avalon) takes up skydiving, prompting Dee Dee (Annette Funicello) also to try free-falling.

Frankie Avalon with Fabian.

Beach Blanket Bingo is Avalon’s last starring role in the beach party films. He appears for only a few minutes in How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (1965) and not at all in The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini.

Donna Michelle, who plays Animal, was Playboy magazine’s Playmate of the Year for 1964.

It is Don Rickles’s fourth film in the series as Big Drop, this time doing some of his night-club act, tossing barbs at the characters, asking why Avalon and Funicello were in the film, as ‘You’re 40 years old!’

The score for all five Beach Party films is composed by Les Baxter. Guy Hemric and Jerry Styner wrote seven songs for the movie and Gary Usher and Roger Christian wrote three songs.

Frankie Avalon recalled: ‘That’s the picture of mine that I think people remember best, and it was just a lot of kids having a lot of fun – a picture about young romance and about the opposition of adults and old people. There’s nothing that young people respond to more than when adults say “These kids are nuts” and that’s what this movie was about. It was also fun because we got to learn how to fake skydive out of an airplane.’

William Asher made the film noirs The Shadow on the Window (1957) and Johnny Cool (1963) but found his true métier in making the beach party B-movies: Beach Party (1963), Muscle Beach Party (1964), Bikini Beach (1964), Beach Blanket Bingo (1965), and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (1965).

“Venus” became Avalon’s first number-one hit.

The cast are Frankie Avalon as Frankie, Annette Funicello as Dee Dee, Harvey Lembeck as Eric Von Zipper, John Ashley as Steve, Deborah Walley as Bonnie, Jody McCrea as Bonehead, Marta Kristen as Lorelei, Linda Evans as Sugar Kane, Don Rickles as Big Drop, Paul Lynde as Bullets, Donna Loren as Donna, Timothy Carey as South Dakota Slim, Buster Keaton as Buster, Bobbi Shaw as Bobbi, Earl Wilson as himself, Michael Nader as Butch, Donna Michelle as Animal, Patti Chandler as Patti, Andy Romano as JD, Alberta Nelson as Puss, Myrna Ross as Boots, and Chris Cranston as a Beach Girl.

The title inspired the title for Steve Silver’s 1974 play Beach Blanket Babylon, America’s longest-running musical revue.

The beach party movies are: Beach Party (1963),  Muscle Beach Party (1964), Bikini Beach (1964), Pajama Party (1964), Beach Blanket Bingo (1965), and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (1965) and The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966).

Other such films are Ski Party (1965), Sergeant Deadhead (1965), Dr Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965), Fireball 500 (1966), Thunder Alley (1967) and Back to the Beach (1987).

Avalon (born Francis Thomas Avallone; September 18, 1940) had 31 charting US Billboard singles from 1958 to late 1962, including the number one hits ‘Venus’ and ‘Why’ in 1959.

He sings ‘Beauty School Dropout’ as Teen Angel in the 1978 musical film Grease.

© Derek Winnert 2021 Classic Movie Review 11,446

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