Beach Movies—The 70s

We now arrive in the 70s as I continue to look back at beach movies for our little summer trip. This week we’re going to visit a classic—The Way We Were. And it will take us to Malibu again, but a rather different Malibu than Gidget’s was.

The Way We Were won the WGA award for its screenwriter and was named one of the 10 Best Films of the Year by the National Board of Review.

The film tells the story of a Jewish bookworm/activist, Katie [Barbara Streisand], and a gentile writer, Hubbell [Robert Redford], who are peripherally aware of one another in college—truth be told, she has a crush on him which she doesn’t want to admit even to herself. They’re in a writing class together and she really wants to be a writer—but it’s Hubbell’s story that captures the professor’s attention. He may be a bit decadent in her mind but he’s a fine writer—and she can see that… the story of his that’s read in class lets her see under the skin of the persona he projects, she feels she sees the real Hubbell. But it’s not until after college, and after WWII, that they meet and become involved.

This is very much an opposites-attract kind of film. But these opposites get married and move to—guess where—Malibu, California. He’s offered a chance to adapt his first novel for the movies, so she reluctantly agrees to go, giving it two years and then they’ll move to France where he can write his second novel. She doesn’t like the artificial atmosphere of Los Angeles and the beach in Malibu where they live becomes a symbol of superficiality—and Katie is anything but superficial.

They go to parties at his producer’s house—a place higher up with a view of the beach—and the best she can do is make fun of them. First Hubbell does too, but the truth is, he likes it, likes the palm trees and the movie business and wants to make it work. By the time they realize that they don’t want the same thing, she’s pregnant and demonstrating against the Black List in the early 1950s and he’s having an affair with a girl he knew in college who is way prettier than she ever was.

Is this really a beach movie you might ask? Well, I think it is. Because the beach is a stand-in for the bad guys in this film… all the producers and directors and superficial movie people that live the beach life style and don’t get involved in, to Katie, what’s important.

The beach is style and Katie wants more than style and comfort—she [spoiler alert] moves back to New York, where she can find substance. And Hubbell doesn’t.

It's as if a subtext of this film is that the beach may be lovely but it’s like sand, it just falls through your fingers, and if you want something real, something to hold onto, you head to New York!

Having lived in both places, I have to say, I think she’s got the right idea!!

Copyright © Diane Lake

20Aug17

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