@glenn__kenny Published June 15, 2026, 9:00 a.m. ET Photos: Everett Collection; Illustration: Don Pearsall See more of our coverage in your search results.
Add Decider on Google Where to Stream: Beach Rats (2017) Powered by Reelgood More On: summer The 15 Best Summer Movies Of All Time: ‘Wet Hot American Summer,’ ‘Jaws,’ and More Summer 2026 Movies: Which Blockbusters Will Reign Supreme At the Box Office? (And Which Will Bomb?) Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Double Scoop’ on Hallmark, In Which Reps From Competing Ad Agencies Try To Woo Dairy Farm Owners And Fall For Each Other Along The Way The New Trailer For ‘Snoopy Presents: A Summer Musical’ On Apple TV+ Features Charlie Brown On A Mission To Save Summer Camp Summer is finally here, and nothing evokes the spirit of the season like sand, sun, sweat, and surf. Here, in DECIDER’s A Brief History of Beach Movies, critic Glenn Kenny charts the evolution of one of the most iconic and idiosyncratic genres in cinema… Last week, we tracked the innocent beginnings of beach movies. Now, that innocence is firmly lost.
Joe Pasternak was a producer of premium musicals for MGM through the ’40s and ’50s, racking up titles like In The Good Old Summertime and Summer Stock, both starring Judy Garland. But by the late 1950s this kind of picture was going out of style and an emergent youth market demanded attention. Hence, MGM essayed The Reluctant Debutante costarring a pre-Gidget Sandra Dee.
Pasternak was determined to meet the new audience and do it affordably. He bought a novel by a Michigan State professor named Glendon Swarthout, whose observations of coed mating rituals as enacted during spring break inspired his book, Where The Boys Are. (Swarthout would later write The Shootist, which was adapted by Don Siegel into John Wayne’s last picture, one of the best of his late period.) As perhaps befits a story written by a pedagogue, it’s one with a lesson.
Where The Boys Are begins with the stentorian tones of Paul Frees, the quintessential narrator of so much Boomer youth material (he’s the voice of Santa in Rankin/Bass’s Frosty the Snowman) telling us: “For fifty weeks of the year, Fort Lauderdale Florida is a small corner of tropical heaven, basking contentedly in the warm sun. During the other two weeks as colleges all over the country disgorge their students for Easter vacation, a change comes over the scene, as students swarm to these peaceful shores in droves, 20,000 strong. They turn night into day, and a small corner of heaven into a sizeable chunk of bedlam. The boys come to soak up the sun — and a few carloads of beer. The girls come very simply because this is…” You guessed it: Where the boys are.
Connie Francis sings the plaintive theme song and plays one of the four girls who take off from their snowy Michigan campus to drive to Fort Lauderdale. The other three are studious but thirsty Dolores Hart (who in real life gave up showbiz for a convent), wannabe mom Paula Prentiss, and cute naif Yvette Mimieux. “What could be more interpersonal than ‘backseat bingo’?” Dolores asks of her prim professor Dr. Raunch, who’s played by future Spielberg semi-regular Amy Douglas. Driving down they pick up garrulous hitchhiker TV Thompson, a lanky Jim Hutton. It’s all fun and games up to the first 24 minutes precisely, when credulous Mimieux falls hard for Yalie creep Franklin (Rory Harrity) and loses her virginity on the first date.
Camille Paglia observes of the movie: “It shows smart, lively women skillfully anticipating and fending off the dozens of strategies with which horny men try to get them into bed. The agonizing date rape subplot and climax are brilliantly done. The victim, Yvette Mimieux, makes mistake after mistake, obvious to the other girls. She allows herself to be lured from her girlfriends and into isolation with boys whose character and intentions she misreads. Where the Boys Are tells the truth.” The truth is leavened with a lot of quirky humor, much of it centered on future Riddler Frank Gorshin as a bass player who extolls the virtues of “dialectic jazz.” You also can’t help but notice the huge amount of smoking going on. Inspirational dialogue after a gang rape” “They weren’t even Yalies.” Aiiiieeee.
You don’t necessarily associate the crime stories of genre great Elmore Leonard with the beach. But for his first hard-boiled tale, 1969’s The Big Bounce (he had been entrenched in Westerns prior to this), the action is set near Michigan’s Lake Huron. The movie transposes the action to the California coast, where occasional fruit-picking drifter Jack Ryan (no relation), played by Ryan O’Neal, is picked up hitchhiking by a couple, one of whose number is Nancy, played by O’Neal’s wife at the time, Leigh Taylor-Young. He gets put up at the couple’s beach house, and soon Jack and Nancy are messing about. They’re two made-for-each-other sociopaths, except Nancy is just a little more psycho. Learning of Jack’s time in Vietnam, she asks, “Did you ever kill anybody?” “Yeah, I suppose so,” he responds. “Was it fun?” Hoo boy.
Leonard called this “the second worst movie ever made,” reserving first place for its 2004 remake, starring Owen Wilson. The movie’s goofy score, a concoction of squeaky-clean-music purveyor Mike Curb, actually comes in for a drubbing in Thomas Pynchon’s novel Inherent Vice. (One of its songs, “When Somebody Cares For You.” was actually covered by Donny and Marie Osmond, while the main theme is reminiscent of Mary Poppins’ “A Spoonful of Sugar.”) For all that, the movie is a dynamite time-capsule curio and it features a ton of Leigh Taylor-Young nudity if you’re connoisseur of that sort of thing.
Youth is a time of exuberance and exploration but also anxiety and sometimes cruelty, as 1969’s Last Summer demonstrates. Director Frank Perry’s adaptation of an Evan Hunter novel sees initially pale boys Richard Thomas and Bruce Davison intrigued in the extreme by Barbara Hershey’s Sandy. As in the first Gidget movie, there’s a lot of talk about virginity, but it’s franker and more profane, and the boys start seeming desperate. Sandy is of course a mutual object of desire, but their tense little triangle is made even more disquieting by the introduction of socially awkward Rhoda, played by a heartbreaking Kathy Burns. This is one of those movies in which the progression from bad to worse is so inexorable and ghastly that you watch this sun-drenched movie through half-closed fingers. An absolute tour-de-force and a strong post-counter-culture statement that the kids are no longer all right.
And there’s more unmitigated anxiety about interpersonal relations in 2017’s Beach Rats, Eliza Hittman’s simultaneously blunt and artful portrait of a Coney Island-frequenting kid who hangs with a blusteringly toxic male crowd while secretly pursuing gay yearnings. In a defining early role, Harris Dickinson plays a character who’s tough to like — he ultimately betrays a character who tries to help him out of his very suffocating closet — but who nevertheless elicits empathy. Other grim Coney Island pictures — inversions of The Devil and Miss Jones, in a sense — include the Nathan’s-in-midwinter crime picture Little Odessa and the ostensible comedy Anora, which hits some nasty notes along its quirky way.
Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface, published by Hanover Square Press, and now available for at a bookstore near you.
