The Girls of Summer: Gidget

Surf’s up, kids!  This month’s theme is the girls of summer – a gaggle of surf or party movies with a lady-centric bent.  And we’re starting off with the original surfer girl, Francine “Gidget” Lawrence.

Loosely based on Frederick Kohner’s novel, which in turn is loosely based on the life of his teenage daughter Kathy and the record she kept of her surfing exploits In Malibu, Gidget was brought to the screen by Gabrielle Upton, a soap opera writer who was moonlighting from her day job writing “the Secret Storm”, a popular NBC show. 

In its original movie format, Gidget serves up a simple formula  that actually does a fairly good job of portraying late 50s teenage life as the world stood braced upon the cusp of the social unrest, violence, war and death that would be ushered in by the mid-60’s.   It’s just an inch above your average teen movie froth, and it naturally won’t let its heroine entirely exploit her sense of freedom, but it surprises in its willingness to stretch the boundaries of 50’s conventionality.

Just a slight stretching.  But it’s there.

The story’s a familiar one if you’ve ever seen Psycho Beach Party, which loosely parodies its general plot.  Francine (played with sass by tragic teen queen Sandra Dee), yearning for a simpler time, and unable to grasp her girlfriend’s interest in boys, becomes enamored of surf culture, and in turn determined to become worthy of hanging with a group of seven surf bums.  Along the way, she irritates and then draws the romantic interest of Jeff, one of the group’s youngest acolytes, and develops an interest in the life of the much older Great Kahuna, who leads the group, lives in a hut on the beach, and calls a parrot his best friend as a coping mechanism to deal with the trauma he received in the Korean War.   Through sheer determination she wins the group’s respect, learns how to surf, is dubbed “Gidget” (Short, unfortunately, for “girl midget”), and gets stuck between Moondoggie and Kahuna.  She then proceeds to use Kahuna to make Jeff jealous while actually caring about him, tearing inadvertently the longterm friendship between Moondoggie and Kahuna apart.

Yes, really.

That’s Gidget’s big secret; it’s a story about a girl discovering her sexuality and romance for the first time, discovering what her true passion is, making friends…and then being tucked right back into the square, simple box of domestic expectations.  Yes, it’s no surprise to discover that Jeff was secretly the clean-cut son of a friend whom her protective dad wanted her to go out with at the beginning of the movie, that Gidget and Kahuna never “make it” under the stars and that Jeff and Gidget end up pinned by the end of the movie- but at least there are bonus groovy tunes!

To be fair, this movie focuses on Gidget’s love of surfing more than any of its various sequels, and gives her more outside interests than any movie until “Gidget Grows Up”, but still – perhaps due to its setting, perhaps due to the social mindset of the time –it never has the courage to let Gidget do what she wants to do without shoehorning Jeff into the picture somehow.

This would all be palatable if the relationship between Gidget and Moondoggie were anywhere near as interesting as the more complex one between her and Kahuna, one that yearns to break free of the staid shell surrounding it into something weirder and darker.  But it never really does; in the end Moondoggie and Gidget get pinned and Kahuna chooses to follow Gidget’s advice, tear down his shack and join up with a commercial airline, becoming a pilot once more (Which is clearly a great way to deal with his deeply felt trauma!)

The rest of the Gidget movies sadly follow the convention-loving ending of this movie; subsequent incarnations of Gidget are far more obsessed with Jeff than the pounding of the ocean against the sand, throwing in girl-hate and flimsy triangles to boot.  More daring was the Gidget TV show, which featured Sally Field as a Gidget who was concerned about the world around her, her friends, surfing, and her single dad as well as popularity with boys - unsurprisingly, in this version Jeff's been shuffled off to college and is never seen nor heard from.  It’s a real pity, because a character with that much passion, in a less conventional era, could’ve gone further than the shores of Malibu Beach.

The real Gidget grew up to marry a linguistics professor, become a mother, and keep up her surfing addiction; she still coasts the waves annually in the name of breast cancer research.

She also owns five percent of the name that became synonymous with squeaky clean teen fun, that introduced surfing into American popular culture, and launched the surf-and-beach picture as the genre that dominated much of the early to mid 60’s.

Now that’s how to hang ten.