RIP James Darren.
Rebels, everywhere, are in mourning today after it was announced that actor James Darren died in his sleep at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. He was 88. Darren played many unforgettable roles in film and television, starring alongside William Shatner in the 1980s classic TJ Hooker and the unforgettable Spyros Pappadimos in The Guns of Navarone.
His most iconic turn, though, the fiercely anarchistic Moondoggie in the profoundly counter-culture 1959 cinematic adaptation of Gidget.
While a bubblegum teen romp on the surface, the film actually finds its root in questioning authority. Francine “Gidget” Lawrence, who has just turned 17-years-old, is under intense pressure from friends and family to find a man and become a trad wife. Flipping the bird to custom, she heads to the beach instead and falls for Moondoggie, played by Darren. A man who has rejected norms, Moondoggie is instead hell bent on following an older war veteran, The Big Kahuna, to Peru in order to surf instead of going to lame-o college.
The two eventually get in a raging fight over Gidget and all appears lost with Gidget agreeing to accept her parents’ invitation to the trad life, though it turns out their pick of mans is Moondoggie himself, who had gone undercover as a square.
The august New York Times praised the film as, “enough to make anybody leave one of the neighborhood theatres, where it opened yesterday, and light out for Long Island Sound. Pictorially, this mild little Columbia frolic, about a teen-age girl with boy trouble, seems an ideal way to usher in the beach season.”
Darren reprised the Moodoggie role in two subsequent films Gidget Goes Hawaiian and Gidget Goes to Rome.
The proto-punk stylings made the Philadelphia native a massive hit with disaffected girls, as he recalled in a 2015 sit down with Los Angeles Magazine, “The defining moment was when I was at a studio in San Francisco and word got out that I was there. Thousands of girls were screaming out front. When I had to leave the building, they tackled me to the ground and pulled pieces of my hair out. The police had to rescue me and took me to the roof until things settled down.”
Bad to the bone.
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Is this a movie I should watch?
Definitely Not the worst of the Hollywood beach flicks.
Definitely a more simple time.
No real surf companies, no surf websites, no Wsl, no surf-camps, undiscovered uncrowded waves everywhere.
Take me back.
RIP—JD
Ironically, this film is generally considered the birth of the surf industry.
If there was no Gidget (and no similar film) where would we be today?
Well, half of us probably wouldn’t surf, for one. And the remaining half would be more barrelled, and probably using inferior equipment
Ya, some good points.
I was just looking at the movie as capturing a time in our past, when things were more simple.
Well, the movie did happen, and many pathetic ones after that.
For us living close to the beach, we probably would have started surfing regardless of the movie.
Even with inferior equipment, the stoke, I think, would still be the same.
He’s gone off into the time tunnel like everybody else.
Chas, will you be writing pro surfing’s eulogy from the cobbles at Trestles on Friday?