Don’t Make Waves (1967)

(On Cable TV, September 2020) The mid-1960s were a strange time for Hollywood movies—at once poking and prodding at the social changes occurring over the United States, yet still being held back by decades of slavish adherence to the Hays Code. One of the laboratories through which to study this interregnum is the sex comedy genre, which pushed the envelope… but never too much. They feel charmingly quaint these days, as they play with ideas of infidelity, female characters with their own sexual agenda, and newish modes of living, such as muscle-bound surfers. Is it any surprise if much of it is about the ways Californians were breaking free from US orthodoxy? Such is the situation at the beginning of Don’t Make Waves as a New York promoter drives to California with everything he owns in his car… only to lose it all due to the actions of an inattentive Italian artist. This forces him to live with her, however briefly, and get caught up in a complex web of infidelity, surfing hippies, swimming pool salesmanship and unstable coast-side housing. Tony Curtis is up to his usual good standards as the fast-talking New Yorker almost completely out of his element on the West Coast, but most of the attention usually goes to his female co-stars: Sharon Tate in one of her few roles, this time as a young fit surfer, and the divine Claudia Cardinale as the scatterbrained Italian at the root of his problems. There’s clearly a satirical intention to Don’t Make Waves that’s probably wasted today, as the film goes from one contemporary hot topic to another in a way that may be less obvious in a future in which these topics have become commonplace. Much of the film’s comedy is to be found in one weird situation or another, although the film does hit a highlight later on by featuring a big physical comedy set-piece as the characters are stuck in a house tumbling down a hill. Don’t Make Waves is certainly not a great movie, but like many lesser-known films of the 1960s, it offers a slightly different view on the obsessions of the time, and perhaps even a more honest one even through the comic exaggerations.