Beach Blanket Bingo is a 1965 American beach party film directed by William Asher. It is the fifth film in the Beach Party film series. The film stars Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello, Linda Evans, Deborah Walley, Paul Lynde, and Don Rickles. Earl Wilson and Buster Keaton appear. Evans's singing voice was dubbed by Jackie Ward.

Plot

A singer, Sugar Kane (Linda Evans), is unwittingly being used for publicity stunts for her latest album by her agent (Paul Lynde), for example, faking a skydiving stunt, actually performed by Bonnie (Deborah Walley). Meanwhile, Frankie (Frankie Avalon), duped into thinking he rescued Sugar Kane, takes up skydiving at Bonnie's prompting; she secretly wants to make her boyfriend Steve (John Ashley) jealous. This prompts Dee Dee (Annette Funicello) to also try free-falling. Eric Von Zipper (Harvey Lembeck) and his Rat Pack bikers also show up, with Von Zipper falling madly in love with Sugar Kane. Meanwhile, Bonehead (Jody McCrea) falls in love with a mermaid named Lorelei (Marta Kristen). Eventually, Von Zipper "puts the snatch" on Sugar Kane, and in a Perils of Pauline-like twist, the evil South Dakota Slim (Timothy Carey) kidnaps Sugar and ties her to a buzz-saw.

Cast

Cast notes:

Production

The part of Sugar Kane, played by Linda Evans, was intended for Nancy Sinatra. This change was due in part to the fact that the plot involved a kidnapping, somewhat reminiscent of her brother Frank Sinatra Jr.'s kidnapping a few months before shooting began. That made her uncomfortable, causing her to drop out. Elsa Lanchester was announced for a small role off the back of her performance in Pajama Party but does not appear in the final film. The character of Deadhead in Beach Party, Muscle Beach Party and Bikini Beach is called Bonehead in this film because AIP had decided the term Deadhead was a so-called "bankable noun" and had decided to cast Avalon as the title character of its upcoming Sergeant Deadhead. The Rat Pack leader character Eric Von Zipper is given more screen time in this third film. He gets to sing his own song titled "Follow Your Leader" (which he reprises as "I Am My Ideal" for the follow-up How to Stuff a Wild Bikini). John Ashley, who played Ken in Beach Party, and Johnny in both Muscle Beach Party and Bikini Beach, returns in this movie as Steve, playing opposite his real-life wife Deborah Walley. According to Diabolique magazine, the Beach Party movies "weren’t all about songs, sex, and surfing; they were also about friendship, and you really notice the entries where the lead male isn’t good friends with Ashley – in Beach Blanket Bingo it’s downright stressful to see him and Avalon as strangers." (This sequence can still be seen in 16mm prints and television broadcasts of Beach Blanket Bingo, but the Region 1 MGM DVD omits it. See Music section below)

Music

The score for this movie, like the four preceding it, was composed by Les Baxter. Guy Hemric and Jerry Styner wrote seven songs for the movie: Gary Usher and Roger Christian wrote three songs:

Comic book adaption

Dell Comics published a 12 cent comic book version of Beach Blanket Bingo, with 36 colour pages, in conjunction with the movie's release.

Reception

Howard Thompson of The New York Times wrote "We simply can't believe, no matter what the reports say, that the teen-agers buy such junk. It's for morons." Variety wrote, "No one can blame Nicholson and Arkoff for continuing a pattern that has made them money, but this is ridiculous. Are teenagers responding to such drivel as good natured satire of themselves rather than identifying with it? Let's hope so." Margaret Harford of the Los Angeles Times wrote that "Some of it is pretty silly," but the movie "is best when it is giving the kids a sly drubbing. Its teen-age inanities are not nearly so dull as its adult presumptuousness. For example: Columnist Earl Wilson hovering awkwardly around as a talent spotter. Earl looks as though he'd give a pearl or two just to be back in his less strenuous New York haunts."

Legacy

Frankie Avalon later 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."