At Katie’s behest, I watched LIFEGUARD (1976), supposedly a Ryancore film based on this tantalizing premise:

And how exactly is this Ryancore as fuck? Well, among my friends there seems to be this cartoonish perception of me as a freewheeling loner perma-bachelor. And yet deep down in the secret places in my heart, I am cursed to recall wistfully all my great loves of yore, and to yearn eternally for that radiant affection to shine down upon me one last time so that I might achieve some semblance of salvation. Uh . . . I mean, I reckon there’s at least some truth to that . . .

Anyway: I love the idea of a mid-70s dramedy set in Southern California about a hunky mustachioed sun-baked Sam Elliott hanging out in a lifeguard tower all summer making an hourly wage and trying to score some hot tail. I mean, look at this poster for God’s sake:

Yeah. That definitely rules. And it starts out OK enough . . .

. . . with Sam Elliott, the titular lifeguard, showing a young rookie lifeguard the ropes while winking at cute girls in bikinis and breaking up fights between teenage boys and saving people’s lives with his little red floatie. He drives around LA in his Chevy Stingray that he can somehow afford on a lifeguard’s salary, and spends his evenings bedding flight attendants and elementary school teachers in his swinging bachelor pad. He leads a carefree existence devoid of any conflict. Being a lifeguard . . . is there anything better? And yet he feels empty in some way he cannot place. Maybe there’s more to life than being completely free and having a zero responsibilities. Maybe life is meant to be shared rather than spent alone.

Sam ponders these things (kind of) between little glimpses into his everyday life: driving to a fast food joint to grab a hamburger and a Coke, flirting with a girl who is so horned up she’s a breath away from ripping off her bathing suit while he puts a band-aid on her finger, and plenty of scenes of him wearing aviator sunglasses and scratching his beastly chest hair while gazing off into the distant sea as the warm California sun sets upon another perfect day. All of this is set to a badly-aged groovy Moog synth score and interspliced with little comedy bits that are about as funny as an episode of the Brady Bunch. It has serious soap opera / afterschool special vibes and not in a good way. Every interior scene is lit like a first-year student art film.

At the 45-minute mark of this 96-minute movie, the story, or what little of it there is, had moved about three inches from the starting line, and I began thinking about other things I’d rather be doing, including cleaning my kitchen. Bummer.

I reported my findings to Katie and together we lamented how the movie fails to live up to its chill premise. It could have so easily risen above ordinary trash into the kind that glows in the dark, but alas, they went with the first draft. Any hack writer could have punched this thing up and made it a beautiful schlocky genre thing. As a hack writer myself, I kept thinking of all the little things I would have done to keep the good times rolling the entire time, but what are you gonna do. This thing is nearly 50 years old and feels that way. It is boomer-y as hell and thus a product of its era. Let it be said that Sam gave it his all. It’s not his fault LIFEGUARD feels like a dog turd that washed up on the beach during high tide.

Though hey: there is always the sea itself, which unlike this film is more vast and meditative and timeless than anything else I know.

Surf’s up!