Sink or Swim

By J.C.

LIFEGUARD

Directed by DANIEL PETRIE Screenplay by RON KOSLOW

Modestly ambitious. Lifeguard concerns the folkways and seductions of the California beach life. It means to be funny and a little sad, but Director Daniel Petrie (Buster and Billie) and Writer Ron Koslow share a point of view that slides and shifts like the tide. Their hero is a lifeguard named Rick (Sam Elliott), a 32-year-old beach veteran who gets most of what he requires out of life by patrolling along the water's edge. When Rick thinks he may want a little more than fresh air, sunshine, the chance to meet a few new girls and to save a life now and then, a pal helps him to find a job selling Porsches. Rick will finish out this last season on the beach and then start peddling fast cars to the upwardly mobile even as he enlists in their ranks.

Rick has doubts about his new ambitions, which not even the renewed interest of a high school girl friend (Anne Archer) can resolve. He passes a great deal of time brooding in the sun, pulling swimmers out of the water and keeping order on the sands while he ponders the values in his life.

His surfside ruminations make pretty thin material for a movie, but the real problem with Lifeguard is that Petrie and Koslow do not know what to think, much less what to make of Rick's dilemma. It seems as if they are trying to do a little pencil portrait of fear and failure, but their hero's softheadedness is contagious. Rick's final decision, which is to be a success on his own suffocatingly modest terms, is conveyed with a hint of melancholy but more than a suggestion of approval. Lifeguard is winningly acted--by Elliott and, especially, by Archer and Kathleen Quinlan, who appears as an infatuated teen-ager--but the people who put it all together may, like their hero, have spent a little too much time in the sun.

J.C.

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