Originally posted on 5/21/21
Currently watching: bouncy blonde beach goddess of the 1960s, Joy Harmon, in the incredibly obscure beach flick ONE WAY WAHINE (1965).
If you're a fan of the divine Joy Harmon, chances are you've already watched her magnum opus, VILLAGE OF THE GIANTS (also from 1965) numerous times. You'll also have fond memories of her legendary car-washing scene in COOL HAND LUKE two years later.
And vintage TV fans will even recall her charming appearances with an eyebrow-waggling Groucho Marx on his classic 1950s-era shows "You Bet Your Life" and "Tell It To Groucho" under the name "Patty Harmon."
Joy popped up in several other movies and TV episodes during her career, which spanned from 1956 to 1973, but her only starring role seems to be in the little-known ONE WAY WAHINE. ("It rhymes with bikini!" the poster tells us.)
Shot on a miniscule budget by a long-forgotten production company, this odd little film features Joy as Kit, an impossibly tanned beach bunny who, when not drawing the attention of every man in sight sunbathing on a Hawaiian beach, likes to wander from party to party while making a meager living doing whatever she can to get by.
We first see her stretched out on a beach towel looking almost as dark as "Tan Mom" but without the use of a tanning booth. She's being ogled via binoculars by a couple of fugitives from a Chicago bank robbery, Charley and Hugo (character actors Lee Kreiger and Ken Meyer, familiar faces from such films as THE GHOST AND MR. CHICKEN and LITTLE BIG MAN), as they lounge on the balcony of their Hawaiian getaway pad.
When Kit's friend Lou (David Whorf) delivers some hooch to the crooked pair and deduces that they're sitting on a bundle of stolen cash, he enlists his roommate Chick (Anthony Eisley) to help cook up a plan to steal the stolen loot themselves by setting up Kit and Chick's girlfriend Brandy (Adele Claire) as call girls who will seduce the bank robbers and then slip a Mickey into their drinks.
From the plot description, one can easily surmise that this is anything but the usual "beach party" teen movie. In fact, it's hard to figure out just who the filmmakers were aiming this pleasantly odd diversion at besides Joy Harmon fans hoping to catch her in and out of her clothes while basking in her bubbly dumb-blonde (but not that dumb) persona. (Her energetic dance to the film's theme song is a highlight.)
And unlike the standard beach movies, there's no surfing, romantic complications, zany supporting characters (unless one counts a bearded, unrecognizable Edgar Bergen as aging beach bum Sweeney and "Green Acres" icon Alvy Moore as Kit's amorous landlord), or big-name rock 'n' roll stars.
In fact, most of the people in this movie are well past even pretending to be teenagers. (Pretty Adele Claire could even be described as a "milf.")
Despite various attempts at lightheartedness, the plan that our two main couples are hatching has an air of real danger about it (especially after we see bank robber Charley cleaning his automatic weapon which he always keeps at the ready).
When a dolled-up Kit and Brandy finally show up at Charley and Hugo's pad with knockout pills ready to slip into their drinks, the preliminary partying leads to one bad break after another for the girls until, to our dismay, fists start flying and the attempts at sex become wildly non-consensual. And the situation actually escalates from there.
While the first half of the film drags a bit and gives no indication that it will ever actually become more than a somewhat endearingly cheap novelty, the second half got my movie-watching juices flowing nicely. And the Hawaiian backdrop is a big improvement over the dreary beaches where Frankie and Annette used to hang out.
The cast is made up mainly of recognizable old pros (Eisley, Kreiger, Meyer, Bergen) who help us get past the film's low budget and its bland "point and shoot" directing style. (I won't comment on the image and color quality, sound, etc. since the copy I watched was anything but optimum.)
And of course there's the divine Joy, who provides fans with some delectable eye candy while fully displaying her sparkling personality. She's the main reason for spending time on a mildly diverting but otherwise wholly unexceptional obscurity like ONE WAY WAHINE, and it's to her credit that the time, for me anyway, felt not so badly spent.
