BQ HITS THE BEACH!........THE BEACH HITS BACK IN "FOR THOSE WHO THINK YOUNG"

For Those Who Think Young (1964)    A crazy, shining nugget in BQ's never-ending search for the oddest, most bizarre 1960's movie concoctions.........

                 The studios who rushed to cash in on American International's Frankie 'n Annette "Beach Party" took notice of one particular element..........

                  .........sprinkled in among the surfers and bikini'd beach bunnies - a wheezing, close-to-death collection of ancient, veteran Hollywood actors and washed up refugees from the Vegas lounges. You could practically smell the embalming fluid on this one-foot-in-the-grave group........either on them or their careers.

                   The makers of "For Those Who Think Young" weren't thinking very young........the beach  'n surf stuff and the young actors' romantic entanglements barely register any screen time at all......

                  This movie turns out to be more of a tour through those exhausted showbiz tropes.......and a showcase, so to speak, for a comedic non-entity named Woody Woodbury.

                  Woodbury's a sight to see, alright........he's like a no-talent screenwriter's conception of a drunken stand-up comic, spouting abysmal non-jokes while pretending to get sloshed.......

                   The plot would have you believe this monumentally unfunny slug becomes a sensation among college students who convulse with hysterical laughter at lines like, "He's good to his wife....he never goes home!"   (Asking a film audience to swallow this idea comes close to science fiction...)

                   Back to Woody later (and his equally strange, humor-free live-in partner, played in his usual a-little-of-him-goes-a-long-way style by Paul Lynde....)

                  Let's move on to the youth contingent - curvy virgin Pamela Tiffin resisting the advances of college playboy James Darren.  Darren comes fully equipped with phones in his sports car and a full time minion/social secretary played by Gillligin himself, Bob Denver.

                  And scattered among the beach babes......Sinatra and Martin.......no, not Frank and Dean in bikinis, but their daughters Nancy and Claudia, who fill out the bathing suits much better......

                   Darren's gangster-kingpin dad (the mountainous character villain Robert Middleton) employs his own staff of 90 year old actors, eking out one last film credit in advance of their obituaries,,,,,,

                   But let's go back to all the weird stuff at Woody's nightclub........including  the club's combination stripper and math-genius (Tina Louise).......and Woodbury's unlikely romance with a sweet, straight-laced college professor (the young and cute Ellen Burstyn at the start of her film career, billed as Ellen Macrae..)

                   Back and forth the film lurches, from the painful comedy stylings of  Woodbury and Lynde to the arthritic beach dances, which unfold as if choreographed by Robert Middleton's gang of seniors.

                   When the funniest person in the movie is a puppet (achieved by drawing a face on Bob Denver's bearded chin), you've arrived in the Twilight Zone of 1960's pop culture.

                    2 stars (**)......even for die hard fans of the era, like BQ, one viewing of this per lifetime is more than enough......