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Twain saw the art of it up close, "whizzing by like a bombshell," John Milius takes a more philosophical outlook. The steps to the California beach might be a sacred portal, towheaded jocks stride the Peckinpah stride in the sand and there's the mythos of macho youth in all its blinkered glory. From 1962 to 1974, the surfing conscience split three ways. The champ (Jan-Michael Vincent) goes to seed, is reborn as a family man, lives to see himself as an "old-timer" in documentaries. The curly guppy (William Katt) turns lifeguard and goes to Vietnam, the power to grow a mustache is his reward. The loon (Gary Busey) has his private surrealism, revels in a dilation of draft-dodging theater (Alice's Restaurant). "That's not a sport, that's a disease." Juvenile shenanigans and Zen comprehension are the benchmarks of growth, instilled with a gravity that would be risible if it weren't so deeply felt. (A raucous kegger is illustrative of the style, it goes from splashing pranks to tribal scuffle to slow dance while Mom reads Joseph Heller.) A Tijuana trip, the burger joint gone granola, the holy pouring of paraffin wax over boards, hot air for the sunburned kings. "Who knows where the wind comes from? Is it the breath of God?" The sweeping constant is the ocean, "a boss swell" several stories high is just the Conradian behemoth to reunite friends. (The riptide showdown calls for visceral grandeur and gets it, Greg MacGillivray's camera rides along the wave as it clenches like a fist and the athlete plunges beneath a blitzkrieg of foam.) The end of summer is the end of an epoch, Milius eulogizes it for himself and fellow Movie Brats: "It's been one hell of a party." With Patti D'Arbanville, Lee Purcell, Sam Melville, Gerry Lopez, Robert Englund, Joe Spinell, and Hank Worden.
--- Fernando F. Croce |