Lifeguard (1976) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

You see the title, you read the premise, and you think, "I get it - it's a 90 minute episode of Baywatch with Sam Elliott playing the part of David Hasselhoff."

There is some truth to that because Sam, like Hasselhoff's familiar character, is too old to be a lifeguard, so he faces the fact that the younger guys swim faster, and the more important fact that the younger guys will soon finish their degrees and give up lifeguarding for adult life, but ol' Sam's about to go to his 15th high school reunion and tell people he's "only a lifeguard." One of his high school chums offers to get him a job selling Porsches, so Sam must choose whether to leave the beach. That is the film's entire dramatic conflict, there is no humor to speak of, and the action in the film mostly consists of isolated, picaresque adventures that the lifeguards have in the course of duty, ranging from macho men who don't want to be rescued from drowning, to young lifeguard groupies, to perverts exposing themselves on the beach. All that is left is characterization and musical "life on the beach at sunset" montages.

The character study is reasonably interesting in that the main character's life is developed in great depth, and he ultimately has to choose whether to pursue the money he could make in mainstream society, or to stick with something he really loves with poetic intensity and which gives him a constant sense of accomplishment and worth. In other words, he has to choose between what he wants to do and what others want him to do. Ultimately, he finds a woman who encourages him to be himself, and he decides to be a lifeguard "as long as I can." While he never makes a decision about planning for his future, he does come to the conclusion that not making a decision is an OK decision in itself. Unfortunately, without the good natured self-deprecating humor of Hasselhoff, this film comes off as oh-too-serious and philosophical for the subject matter. It's Baywatch all right, as directed by Louis Malle.

Where the film generates some interest, at least for me, is as a time capsule of the attitudes of the 70s. For example, although it is a PG movie (the PG-13 rating would not be created until 1984), it is rife with nudity, and the lifeguard is carrying on simultaneous affairs with a divorcee and a seventeen year old girl! When the lifeguards see some 12 year old boys removing women's bathing suits, they simply focus their binoculars a bit better and have a good laugh. Our moral guardians were a bit more lax in those days, as was the MPAA itself. Bizarrely enough, that same 1970s MPAA would slap an R-rating on Woody Allen's masterpiece Manhattan although that film centered around an older man sleeping with a seventeen year old without the nudity. I guess if the ol' Woodman would have shown us some flesh, they would have let him skate home with a PG.

Whatever weaknesses Lifeguard may have had did not prevent Sam Elliott from delivering a cool, unpretentiously sensitive, handsome, bronzed and muscular performance that, while it never made him an A-list star, did establish him as a guy with a very special screen presence, and allowed him to establish a long career as the tough, laconic, no-bullshit sidekick in war films and Westerns.