It seems that the parents of the 1950’s didn’t understand their growing children, forgetting that they had once scandalized the older generation in their teens by swinging and jitterbugging. Here, the parents of guitar playing teenager John Saxon are King Kong’s girlfriend, Fay Wray, and the future big boss of “Get Smart”, Edward Platt. Handsome Saxon isn’t interested in heading straight into college right after high school to study medicine, preferring to entertain with his rock and roll band with the winsome Sal Mineo on drums. A T.V. contest looking for the best teen rock band is the ultimate prize that Saxon is after, not a medical license. That’s all there is for plot with the conflict between generations more understated confusion than any real gap. The movie really heads into Donna Reed/Brady Bunch territory with the novelty song, “A Picnic by the Sea”.

The adults gets to say lines to the teens like, “Put on your shoes before your feet start to look like Idaho potatoes!” and “It’s a good thing you didn’t need a grand piano. You would have hocked the house!” The film is probably 65 percent music with moments of plot thrown into give the band a break. The songs aren’t bad with “Can I Steal a Little Love?” having stolen my heart especially with Mineo’s charm oozing off the screen as he winks his way into the audience’s adoration with that winning smile. The real problem here is that these are simply just really nice kids, and considering what was going on was truly worse than even the toughest of conflicts here. At times, the film seems almost cartoonish with its goofiness and sweet natured view of teen life.

George “Foghorn” Winslow gets some great lines, insulting his older sister and desperate for attention from his parents and heroic older brother. At times, Saxon seems to be emulating a more clean-cut version of a young Brando, and when he has a heart-to-heart talk with dad, it is straight out of Andy Hardy territory as two different generations come to an understanding, admitting that really nothing changes in parent/children relationships but the date. That really proves the innocence behind the plot line even though there is a brief fight scene at a dance when Saxon’s girlfriend Luana Patten shows up with another date after a misunderstanding. I just wish that Mineo had more to do than look cute. Some overly dramatic music tries to make the situations seem more serious than they are, but if my recollection serves me right, every problem I faced as a teenager seemed more dramatic than they probably really were. The dramatic moments which explode at the end seem forcibly inserted, twisting the light-hearted first two thirds into a very over the top last third, but it is very satisfying to hear Platt tell Saxon, “Sometimes it takes a father to grow up slower than his children”.