Film Review: Don't Make Waves (1967) USA
A California Screwball Comedy mixing then-popular genres that tries hard but fails to satisfy despite the presence of Tony Curtis, Claudia Cardinale, and ill-fated Sharon Tate
Is it possible to experience a sense of loss for a time and a place that you were never a part of?
This sense of loss is felt due to an individual feeling dissatisfaction with the present conditions of his or her life, either specific to the person or of a more general type. Nostalgia will often fill this void as humans are by nature very forgiving of their own pasts due to selective memory that favours the good over the bad. Yet we cannot live in Nostalgialand, despite ongoing cultural cannibalization of previous eras and political ideas evoking the idea of “RETVRN”, because it is little more than a fleeting shadow disappearing from view. “You can never go home again”, is a truism that serves as a dagger pointed at the heart.
The feeling of loss for a time that you were never present for (Anemoia) shares the same root as nostalgia; that of the idealization of the past. Where it branches off is that nostalgia allows us to place ourselves in the context of a previous time where we physically existed, and where our memories were generated. We therefore have a sense of partial ownership of that certain time frame because we were participants, no matter how insignificant or active our own roles were.
Unlike nostalgia, missing a time and a place where we never were forces us to create mental images that borrow from art, text, and popular culture that have survived to this day. We also borrow heavily from popular culture when reminiscing about our own pasts, but that is tempered by our own personal experiences. Here, the slate is clean and needs to be populated. This creates a significant distortion of actual reality due to the reliance on foreign inputs, one of the most important of those being Hollywood.
DON’T MAKE WAVES is a 1967 comedy directed by Alexander Mackendrick, set in and around Malibu, California, and stars Tony Curtis as a premusably East Coast arriviste who decides to make a new life for himself in the Golden State despite losing his car, clothing, and all of his possessions in a fireball that engulfs his car at the beginning of the film. Playing Carlo Cofield, an opportunist on the make, he successfully manipulates people and situations to the point where he not only scores a beautiful house overlooking the ocean for free, but an incredibly expensive car to go with it, a job in corporate management (with the tease of certain ‘fringe benefits’), and the most beautiful golden brown California blonde woman, a skydiver naturally named ‘Malibu’ and played by Sharon Tate. California Dreamin’, as the Mamas and the Papas sang at the time.
Before we turn to the actual plot, and there isn’t much of one anyway, I want to turn instead to the subject of California, particularly the 60s and 70s. This is a subject of great fascination for me, one that has never failed to see my interest ebb whatsoever. My mind has for some time settled on the notion that those two decades in that state represent a sort of ‘Peak America’. The American Dream was still alive, people could go re-invent themselves in California, the middle class was still expanding and its wage growth and disposable income rising in tandem with it, all in a location with perfect weather. New cultural movements were forming and being shaped that would go on to influence the rest of the world, while Hollywood continued to serve to cultivate our mental visual landscapes, all the while luring the nation’s youth to the West Coast in the meantime, solidifying it as where the future would be created.
Something went wrong, however. All I have to type are two nouns: Manson and Altamont, and everyone will understand what I mean. This is not intended to engage in reductionism, as that would be wrong. California also saw Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple, the Freeway Killers, and served alongside New York City as an epicentre of the growing STD outbreaks among gay men that would result in the HIV crisis of the 80s and 90s. Yet these lack the symoblic meaning of the first two, especially considering that they are considered bookends (which one specificially all depends on who you ask) to the idealism of the 1960s.
DON’T MAKE WAVES was filmed in the summer of 1966 and released in June of the following year, just as the Summer of Love kicked off in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury District. Positive vibes abound in the movie just like they did in California at the time. Produced by Martin Ransohoff, DON’T MAKE WAVES is a very late entry into the already-dying California Beach Movie genre, one which by 1967 had already seen its popularity plumment. Based on a screenplay adapted from a 1959 novel entitled MUSCLE BEACH, it sought to cash in on loosening mores revolving around sex (try and count how many times the word “sex” appears in the movie) while casting the most physically attractive people possible. The beauty of the actors in this film goes a long way in papering over the lack of a real story.