British Beach Party

The Girl-Getters is a dispassionate study of youthful drifters at a British seaside resort, glimpsed, in effect, through bloodshot eyes. When a British moviemaker wants to spell out the middle-class vapidities rejected by youth, he naturally heads straight for the shore where "the grockles" turn out in force. Grockles are the holidaying suckers of all ages, gathering junk in shabby souvenir shops, having their pictures taken, and eating anything, says one young cynic, "so long as it's with chips."

Living year-round in this wretched tourist town is a gang of resolute ne'er-do-wells who wait for the swinging summer months to con the vacationers. Leader of the group is Tinker (Oliver Reed), a street photographer and sex mechanic, who snaps pictures of new arrivals, his way of tagging every new bird on the scene. He and his cronies nest down with most of them, though their conquests seem singularly joyless. Typical, for Tinker, is one giddy pickup who starts nattering about love the minute she gets her clothes off.

The hot-weather Lothario gets his comeuppance from a free-thinking London model (Jane Merrow) who smoothly beats him at his own game. She lets him drive her Buick Riviera and invites him to her father's luxurious summer home, where one of her donnish young Establishment pals sneeringly trounces him in a tennis match. Tinker ultimately sees himself as the girl sees him--inconsequential and rather desperate, not a galloping individualist who puts down society because it stinks, but a wobbly nonentity who is afraid to grow up and compete for all the dandy, vulgar goodies the world affords.

Girl-Getters would be a better movie if Scenarist Peter Draper had put fewer words into his characters' mouths. Occasionally, they seem to be speaking less for themselves than for a troubled generation in toto. But Director Michael Winner masks the deficiency, coolly catching the feverish, gotta-keep-busy restlessness of youth on the go. Wherever the action is, from ballroom to boardwalk to a beachside spree in which a bride-and-groom are burned in effigy. Winner gives a commanding end-of-summer air to every moment of it.

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