For the first twenty-odd minutes, Hideout in the Sun is one of the worst films I’ve ever seen.
It has a bottom-of-the-barrel budget ($10,000, not a lot even in 1960), and that can naturally account for some of its limitations. I understand why it appears like the all the lines in this movie are there via bad ADR. But the early attempt to disguise those limitations via “stylistic choices” makes them so much worse and so much more glaring. Essentially, the camera stays away from the actors’ faces, so that they’re delivering all their lines with their heads tilted to obscure their mouths. It’s not fooling me, it’s annoying me. This isn’t Skinamarink!
Similarly, if you don’t have money for a new location–a bank for your bank-robbing brothers to knock over–it’s fine to start the movie after the robbery, as opposed to staying in the getaway car as it circles and circles around the block. This is twenty minutes of being on hold. During the (painfully slow) getaway, the brothers stop at multiple red lights. Each time, I felt my soul die. One brother checks his watch, and I’ve rarely felt so seen.
But then. Then.
Then, surly Duke (Greg Conrad) and sweet Steve (Earl Bauer), who have taken Dorothy (Dolores Carlos) hostage, decide to wait out the heat at her country club. It’s for married couples only, so she has to pretend she and Steve are newly and impulsively hitched; Duke will ride past the gates in the trunk. They can all hunker down in Dorothy’s cottage until Steve and Duke’s boat ride to safety comes through.
And Dorothy’s country club is a nudist resort. And abruptly, the movie becomes, if not good, then strangely adorable.
This was the first film by exploitation sensation Doris Wishman, and you can see her feeling out how to handle the genre (censorship laws allowed “nudies” with a sociocultural veneer to their T&A). The required quasi-documentary tone gives Hideout in the Sun an appealing earnestness: Steve marvels over how healthy and happy everyone here feels. Why, it’s almost spiritually cleansing for him! What a wonderful way to bring up a family! Sun-tanned, smiling men and women stand in a circle in a pool and bat a beachball around with the eerie, still happiness of cultist true believers. Everyone looks like a ’50s advertisement, just without clothes. In my favorite detail, there’s a beach volleyball game where the side closest to the camera can go bottomless because bare butts are A-okay, but the other wide has to wear trunks/boxers/bikini bottoms because full-frontal is off-limits, and I realized with absolute delight that this makes it the nudist equivalent of shirts vs. skins.
Unavoidably, part of the enjoyment here is lurid–I don’t know about you, but yes, I’d rather look at naked people than another fucking red light–but it’s all presented with such spiffy, fresh-faced wholesomeness that it doesn’t feel that way. The energy picks up enormously, because this is the part of the part of the film Wishman cares about, and it shows. The halting Steve/Dorothy romance and Steve’s awkward character growth provide more emotional stakes and development than anything until now, and intercutting their sunlit frolicking with Duke seething in Dorothy’s cottage actually adds a bit of suspense. Ooh, he’s not going to be happy with how this is going! Will Steve be able to break free from his controlling brother? Will the other nudists withdraw their friendliness if they find out the truth?
Some of this energy and specificity lingers even as Wishman turns her attention back to the crime plot and Steve and Duke, now openly quarreling, hit the road again. Duke winds up alone, taking the money and fleeing into the Miami Serpentarium. Now we’re getting production value out of actual reptiles, not just actual nudists! It’s genuinely cool and exciting to watch Duke attempt to make his way through lawns populated by alligators and king cobras. If you have no money, using what little you do have to get things most movies rarely turn up is indeed the way to go.
The first twenty minutes could have been any crime film, done badly. The final fifty–prurient, innocent, and oh-so-Floridian–could only be from Hideout in the Sun. I almost turned this off a dozen times, and I’m glad I didn’t. It’s not good. You don’t need to watch it. But it’s odd and (appropriately) unabashed, and that grants it a kind of off-kilter charm.
Hideout in the Sun is streaming on Tubi.
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Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
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What did we watch?
Justified, Season Six, Episode Three, “Noblesse Oblige”
“I always said I’d never let a son of mine die down in the mines.”
“I know for a woman to survive this line of work, they gotta be harder than the men.”
This episode feels like moving pieces into place. Avery Marcum’s connection to everything being revealed is nice; Sam Elliot plays him with amazing menace. What I like about Justified is not knowing where the endgame is going to be, and I gotta say, I got no idea where this is going. There’s an episodic plot in here, just to give us the sense of an arc; seeing a dad live with his son’s problems, one more revelation of someone who doesn’t have enough money to even get his child out of Harlan.
Biggest Laugh: N/A
Biggest Non-Art Laugh: “I ain’t gotta grab it. I’m just gonna shoot it off. You hear me, Earl? I’m gonna shoot your dick off.”
Top Ownage “You think they think if they don’t speak we won’t know who they are?”
Somehow Sam Elliot without a moustache is scarier than Sam with one.
You don’t know what a clean-shaven Sam Elliot will do! None of us do!
His smile is so unsettling. There’s too much skin.
Widow’s Bay, “Welcome to Widow’s Bay”
Immediately and endearingly My Shit. A lot of horror-comedy can fall down on the horror, but this has exceptional atmosphere–the isolated setting, the fog, and (as we see in the final seconds) that mysterious underground chamber–and a good sense of how to execute the moments of escalation–Shep attacking Tom is filmed like pure horror, and Rhys plays Tom’s reaction with total desperate panic. And then, of course, this is extremely funny and extremely, precisely weird in its humor (the debate about an age gap relationship in a town legend). Rhys is already killing it and has somehow never been better-looking than he is as a harried small town mayor in a sweater, trying to be reasonable but succumbing to paranoia.
“Well, he *died*, Tom” made me pause the show because I was laughing so hard. And yes, a big part of what makes this show work is that it is actually frightening and doesn’t undercut the scares too often. It apparently started as essentially a Parks & Rec spec script but the show commits much more to the awfulness of a place that perhaps cannot get better.
Elementary, “Rip Off” – A hand is found floating in a puddle. Before long, Sherlock figures out where the body is, who the victim was, and why he was killed. This one gets a bit far fetched in trying to explain why the hand was severed, and the mystery doesn’t entirely work for me. The most interesting thing about it is that Sherlock is about to identify the victim as a religious Jew because he knows something about how religious Jews dress that most people don’t. Also, Watson is absent entirely – the only time that happens – and Kitty gets to do her thing and does it well. There are is also a B plot about Gregson trying to defend the honor of his daughter, also a cop, that isn’t very interesting, and Sherlock discovers Watson wrote “The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes,” gets upset, and forgets about it.
NBA Draft Hoopstreams – A rare instance of free live content from ESPN, which barely showed Adam Silver announcing the draft picks, but also spared us 10,00o inane interviews. Brian Windhorst is entertaining, if not exactly Mike Breen.
Tales From The Crypt, “Mute Witness to Murder” – Kind of a lame title and it doesn’t matter. Arguably the show at one of it’s peaks, telling a Hitchcockian suspense story in less than 30 minutes with a sense of economy and efficiency. (The villain even says he’s gonna skip any self-justification for his crime.) This is aided in part by Jim Simpson’s direction, Patricia Clarkson, largely robbed of her 40’s noir voice and still amazing – at the end, she is drifting between sanity, sheer relief, and insanity – and the great Richard Thomas. (It is always hilarious when 1990’s bad guys with that greasy, slicked back hair insist people can trust them. No I can’t, Doctor, I’ve seen your hairstyle!)
Gangs of New York – I have declared it Summer of Scorsese! Filling in my gaps in his filmography. This technically isn’t one, but I hadn’t seen it since theaters when I found it a disappointment compared to the hype of the master filmmaker’s long-gestating project.
Now I can appreciate the bombast and thrills of the majority of its scenes – true can’t-look-away cinema. It’s the connective tissue between these great scenes that keeps this from matching his best movies. There’s trouble in lots of the spaces but most obvious when trying to track the Cameron Diaz character who wholly supports the cause/has to escape the city/is turned back and I guess is… down for whatever? You can apply this to most any character, most of whom still work to some degree thanks to great performances, but tend to have their motivations and arcs obscured from time to time.
There’s two kinds of long-gestating projects, ones where the movie gets honed during the extra time and sharpened to precision (thinking of Fury Road or The Matrix). Gangs belongs to another category with Aronofsky’s The Fountain. Everything has been worked out in the director’s head, but they forget to translate all of it. The idea behind the thing is bigger than the what’s presented.
Still, what a presentation!
I want to fill in my Scorsese gaps too, but I might make this my Summer of Hitchcock, since I finally watched both Lifeboat and The Trouble with Harry last weekend. Maybe I’ll pick up your Scorsese torch next summer.
I technically still have a fair few Hitchcock blind spots but I can’t say I’m that excited about the ones I have left. That said, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by a few with lesser reputations.
I know I’m going to hit some duds (I don’t have high hopes for Juno and the Paycock, for example), but I feel like being a completionist here could be fun.
i want to hear what you thought of those, especially having just seen Lifeboat again. (Some of his early British stuff is now on Prime.)
I was busy Monday and Tuesday mornings, but I’ll play catch-up tomorrow and put last weekend’s viewing on the Thursday article. (And the movie that I watched last night and then promptly forgot to write up, for that matter.)
You pointing out that Lifeboat had finally turned up on streaming again was a huge help to getting me to finally do this!
I guess I’ll do this soon too, with Blank Check episodes on the horizon. But then I completely failed to fill any Weir gaps, so maybe not. I’m mostly missing the early ones (that aren’t Taxi Driver / Mean Streets) and the most recent ones (in my defence, they’re very long), plus also Color of Money.
Some are strangely hard-ish to find. Had to get an old library copy of New York, New York. I think I’m going to reserve Silence as the finale, since that’s the most recent one I haven’t seen.
Silence is the most recent one I have seen, so I only have two newies to catch BUT they have a combined length of nine days (approx.)
I still pay for a DVD rental service which is usually pretty good for the tricky stuff and seems like my best option for NYNY! I assume they’re perpetually on the verge of going bust but who knows, maybe there’s still somehow money in it. I guess they probably don’t need a lot of staff.
Scorsese is a daunting mountain to climb. Many movies, scattered across multiple streaming services, many of them rather long. Odds are I will maybe watch a few I missed and a few I haven’t seen in a while, but otherwise just listen and figure that will just have to do for now.
The screenplay process was famously messy with more than one writer making a go of it, including Kenneth Lonergan (I’d be curious who wrote Bill’s monologue scene, which is the second best in the film – “I killed the last honorable man fifteen years ago.”) The book btw is one of my favorites and I will never give away my copy.
There is definitely an exquisite corpse feel to the story. Bill’s monologue and Leo’s whole character are part of that feel – Bill thought the world of Leo’s dad, Leo wants revenge and is hanging around… after a while I can’t quite figure out what we’re doing here.
World Cup (“Soccer”) – another England match. This one wasn’t as fun as the last one though, Ghana had a gameplan of defensive frustration and it was impressive but in no way enjoyable to watch. Sport!
Twilight Zone, “Time Enough at Last” – maybe too familiar from parodies to really hit me like it should, but still enjoyable of course. More tomorrow.
I saw it suggested that it was to Ghana’s advantage to play to a scoreless tie. This is the sort of thing that maybe prevents offense-crazy Americans from loving soccer between World Cups.
Yeah, they won their opening match so an extra point gives them an excellent chance of progressing. Gotta admire their resolute defending but actually watching it was quite painful. The way FIFA have set the tournament up this year (more teams than ever before etc) doesn’t really encourage a bold approach.
Thankfully, the round robins are almost over and we can get back to 0-0 games decided by shootouts. (I know FIFA has good reasons for eliminating the Golden Goal, but I always find the combination of not having sudden death and going to shootouts a bit anticlimactic. There is nothing more exciting than an overtime goal to win a hockey playoff game.)
You know, in a way, this movie’s innocence makes it even weirder – it eventually turns into a series of postcards, essentially. I can imagine Hawkeye Pierce, having escaped the Korean War, watching this and becoming slowly infuriated with its tameness.
It does! And same: once they get to the resort, this basically brings all the photos in his magazines to life and fuses them with the energy of Crabapple Cove.
I’ve only seen Deadly Weapons from Wishman (if giant jugs killed, essentially), could give this a shot if I can bear those first twenty minutes.
The opening section is probably better when you know exactly when it’s going to come to an end, so you at least know what you’re getting into.
If giant jugs killed, you say ….
It’s a fun time!
I was going to say that it’s no surprise that Tubi is the host here, but I remember Criterion did a Wishman retrospective a couple years ago. The only one I checked out was Nude on the Moon, and if you think doing a bank robbery on a budget is a challenge… apparently the moon looks exactly like a Los Angeles park and the denizens lounge around and also play volleyball.
Aw, come on, Wishman, at least go full Doctor Who/Star Trek and make the moon an abandoned quarry!
Year of the Month update!
This July, we’re opening up submissions for your writing on any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 1979.
Jul. 3rd: Bridgett Taylor: Apocalypse Now
Jul. 5th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Stalker
Jul. 14th: Lauren James: Flowers in the Attic
Jul. 19th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Guards! Guards!
Jul. 28th: John Bruni: All That Jazz
Jul. 29th: Lauren James: Ghost Story
And there’s still time to sign up for any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 1958 this June.
Jun. 25th: John Bruni: Mon Oncle
Jun. 26th: Gillian Nelson: Disneyland Gay Days
Jun. 28th: Tristan Nankervis: Touch of Evil