Amazon.com
Director Michael Winner (
The Nightcomers,
Death Wish) casts a jaded eye on the beach movie and comes up with a surprisingly frank look at beachside beatniks in this drama of a seaside Don Juan who realizes he's becoming too old to keep up his love-'em-and-leave-'em lifestyle. Oliver Reed stars as Tinker, a seaside photographer who has turned his business of snapping holiday portraits of tourists into a system for spotting comely young birds. With their names and addresses in hand, he puts them into a pool and he and his friends go on the make. But Tinker, a cheeky character with an unhealthy disdain for the middle class crowds, finds himself on the other end of the holiday romance when he falls for a sophisticated model, Nicola (Jane Merrow), a smart, confident woman who proves every inch his match. "Are you hoping I'd go to bed with you?" she asks on a visit to his hovel of a studio. In this film shot by future director Nicolas Roeg and edited in a style that at times recalls the giddy energy of
A Hard Day's Night, Winner transforms the fun-in-the-sun antics of his romantic mercenaries into an introspective character study set in the dying days of summer. Reed creates a melancholy figure in his underachieving, flip-talking cad who keeps his façade intact to the end in an empty gesture of blasé indifference. Music is provided by the Searchers, who make a rare film appearance in a club scene.
--Sean Axmaker
