Endless Summer
(Bruce Brown, 1966)
The music, the photography, the narration, the gags, the adventure and, most of all, the spinning, dreamy peelers at Cape St. Francis -- almost 35 years after its coast-to-coast big-screen release and subsequent glowing reviews in Time, Newsweek and The New Yorker -- Endless Summer still hits all the right notes. The untouchable surf movie.

Morning of the Earth
(Alby Falzon, 1972)

Bucolic Australian countryside, organic produce, a bearded Nat Young as Surfing Moses parting the waters at Byron Bay, young Terry Fitzgerald body-torquing at Rocky Point, Michael Peterson in the tube at Kirra -- all this, plus a first look at the mystical Balinese reefbreaks. A lovely, stony surf film.

Free Ride
(Bill Delaney, 1977)
Delaney and cameraman Dan Merkel set a film-quality standard with Free Ride that wouldn't be met until Jack McCoy hit peak form in the mid-'90s. It's memorably a chronicle of Pipeline/Off the Wall during the Hawaiian winter of 1975 -'76, but the Australian and Indonesian segments are excellent as well. (California is written off -- as was fashionable at the time -- as crowded, gray and dirty.) Mark Richards, Wayne Bartholomew and Michael Tomson are great in support and help make the point that the Hawaiians would have to step aside for the hot, young Aussies and South Africans. But Free Ride is really Shaun Tomson's film, and the lines he draws in the tube -- frontside and backside, and often with a joyous smile on his face -- are still in use and virtually unchanged today.

Pacific Vibrations
(John Severson, 1979)
A lost classic. But not the lost classic it could have been, had Severson secured the rights to the Beatles music he had cued up in the film's original version. Not a bad soundtrack even so, with Steve Miller and Crosby, Stills and Nash heading the roster. Jock Sutherland and Bill Hamilton team up for an expertly photographed and edited trip to Maui; cameos by wave-ski master Merv Larson (ripping and tailsliding at Rincon in 1969 the way Slater would in the early '90s), Corky Carroll (riding artificial waves at the Big Surf wave pool in Tempe, Arizona) and soon-to-be-world-champion Rolf Aurness. Ponderous in spots and some of the "art" moments are either dated, or didn't work to begin with. Still, the love and craftsmanship Severson put into Pacific Vibrations comes shining through, and it's too bad that this one isn't yet available to the general surfing public.

Surfing the '50s
 (Bud Browne compilation, 1994)
"Look closely at the faces in that video," 1964 world champion Midget Farrelly said after Surfing the '50s was released. "There was just something so uncorrupt about these people's involvement with surfing -- something so honest. What a rich, beautiful scene." Highlights from eight of Browne's films from the '50s and early '60s are here, and it is rich and beautiful. And it's thrilling, too, with huge, glassy Makaha Point surf and a short bit on the tension-filled morning of November 7, 1957, when Greg Noll led the first charge at Waimea Bay. There's essential footage of Buzzy Trent, Chubby Mitchell, Marge Calhoun, Phil Edwards, Dewey Weber, 16-year-old Linda Benson sliding one at Waimea, comedy with the avuncular Hevs McLelland and quick glimpses of surfing originals Duke Kahanamoku and Snowy MacAllister.

Five Summer Stories
(Greg MacGillivray and Jim Freeman, 1972)
Essential, yes, but overrated. The original version was made after MacGillivray and Freeman began contracting with Hollywood, and while Five Summer Stories is as beautifully photographed, edited and scored as any of their previous films (or much better scored, actually, with music from the Beach Boys and Honk), the focus and passion aren't quite there. Five Summer Stories may be a little too slick. The better film by far -- perhaps the best surf film ever made -- is Mac-Free's 1970 effort Waves of Change (released the following year in mainstream movie theaters under the name Sunshine Sea); right-thinking surfers should unite in a letter-writing campaign to liberate this one from the vaults.

Performers '83/'84
The video that killed the surf movie. Although one of the opening scenes featuring Rabbit Bartholomew fiddling with a car radio seems harmless enough, the reality is that he's tuning into a whole new way of watching surf footage. Performers wasn't the world's first surf video -- Mickey/Natal films and Off the Wall 2 have that honor -- but this no-nonsense showcase of Quiksilver's hottest young talent was the first video to reach the masses. Instead of hooting with the tribe in a smoke-filled college auditorium, surfers developed a more private relationship with the surfers on screen. In the comfort of their own homes, they could rewind Kong's frontside layback snap, break it down into frames, then go out and copy the move at their local beachbreak. Same goes for Chappy Jennings' tube style at Pipe. Or Richard Cram's cutback. The result? Less socializing, more time spent in the basement, studying the tape.

Going Surfing
(Bud Browne, 1973)
With Going Surfing, Bud Browne brought his surf movie career to an end in fine style after 20 noble years of service. Here he does an excellent job blending his old and new footage, and the perfect rhythm he hits at the beginning of the film (a Phil Edwards profile segues into a Gerry Lopez profile) is maintained throughout. Jeff Hakman, Buzzy Trent, Larry Bertlemann, Greg Noll, David Nuuhiwa, Mike Doyle, Jackie Dunn, Sam Hawk, Makaha, Honolua, Pipeline, Malibu, Waikiki -- Going Surfing is a nice, big, bursting scrapbook featuring a nice, big, happy surfing family.

Gidget
(Columbia Pictures, 1959)
At the end of Gidget, it's a terrible thing to watch Cliff Robertson as the Kahuna rip apart his Malibu shack and march off to join the workforce. But the moral point, thankfully, was completely lost to the tens of thousands of pre-surf-magazine-era surfers who flocked to see Hollywood's original beach flick in 1959. "Sure it was corny," Bob McTavish remembers. "But there were a few shots of Miki Dora surfing and a couple of seconds of him in the corner playing a bongo drum on the beach, and for me it was like -- that's Dora! I had a deal going with the girl who worked at the movie theater, and I had the schedule down perfectly. Four times a day, I'd rush over and catch the parts I wanted to see. I knew exactly when Dora was riding those waves, and I wasn't going to miss a second." Of course Gidget wasn't a perfect depiction of surfing as it existed in the late '50s, but it did catch something of the essence. Terry "Tubesteak" Tracey, the real Malibu Kahuna, has said as much, and that has to be the final word.

Apocalypse Now
(Zoetrope, 1979)
Colonel Kilgore, played by Robert Duvall, has no strategic interest in taking Charlie's Point -- deep in Vietcong-held territory -- but he napalms the nearby village to cinders nonetheless. Why? "The waves!" Kilgore shouts after stepping from his chopper onto the sand and fixing his gaze to the sea while sniper bullets fly past. "Look! A good 6-foot swell!" Not much surfing here, but the finest testament ever made to the essentially obsessive -- even lunatic -- world-onto-itself surfing character. And a brilliant metaphor for the Vietnam War.

 

Evolution
(Paul Witzig, 1969)
This is Witzig's most famous movie, thanks to 16-year-old Wayne Lynch making his kinetic, deep-carving, high-energy "Involvement School" big-screen debut. But believe Witzig when he says, "I've looked at [Evolution] a few times recently, and it gives me a headache, honestly." The LSD-dipped soundtrack, the lack of narration and almost no editing help make Evolution -- Lynch's turns excepted -- a bum trip. Far more palatable is Witzig's previous effort, Hot Generation, which begins at the tail end of the longboard era and ends with Nat Young and Bob McTavish riding their revolutionary vee bottoms in gorgeous blue-green walls at Honolua Bay in December 1967.

Cosmic Children
(Hal Jepsen, 1970)
Cosmic Children is an amateur production, but a showcase for Jeff Hakman and Barry Kanaiaupuni on the North Shore during the fabled winter of 1969. Jepsen was never a threat to MacGillivray-Freeman -- anyone with a Bolex, a plane ticket and 10 grand could have made this film -- but he was in the right place at the right time, and that counts for a lot. Jepsen actually did better work in years ahead (Expression Session II, A Sea for Yourself, Super Session), but Cosmic Children stuck where the others didn't. It also includes some dreamscape footage of Jay Riddle at the Ranch.

Surfing for Life
(David Brown and Roy Earnest, 1999)

Back to the future. We should all live as long and as well as Doc Ball, Rabbit Kekai, Eve Fletcher, Woody Brown and the rest of the seniors featured in this soulful, uplifting documentary. Historical footage and plenty of interviews. A bit too much reminiscing, but priceless thoughts on surfing, physical and mental health, and aging gracefully.

Fluid Drive
(Scott Dittrich, 1974)

Plenty of mindless, hot surfing footage, but the best thing about this one is the bootlegged soundtrack. Everybody in the surf flick biz stole music in the '70s. None, however, did so with Dittrich's sense of grand scale: in Fluid Drive we get Hendrix, the Stones, B.B. King, Lou Reed and lots of other high-energy favorites, all ripped right off of Dittrich's own turntable. And boy does it make a difference. For surfers of a certain age, Barry Kanaiaupuni at Sunset, backed by "Voodoo Chile," is about as good as it gets.
© Copyright 2003 Surfline, Inc. Use of this site is subject to the following Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy