It's Connie Francis, Dolores Hart, Yvette Mimieux, and Paula Prentiss who want to know Where The Boys Are in this MGM film which gave the studio a chance to display some of its young starlets. The answer is course Fort Lauderdale where the girls are on spring break.

So are the boys and they consist of George Hamilton, Frank Gorshin, and Jim Hutton. The film has the girls as innocents looking for love and the boys as looking to score. In the end there's a bit of both involved.

Of the female quartet I liked Paula Prentiss the best. She and Jim Hutton are both zany and droll as the comic relief in this film. Prentiss reminded me a great deal of her performance in Man's Favorite Sport which I think is one of the funniest films of the Sixties.

One of the girls has an unfortunate encounter with a kid who was looking to score. One of them finds real true love. The others just have a good time.

Connie Francis got one of those "and introducing" billings and she got a big hit record with the title song back in the day. I'm surprised it was not given an Oscar nomination.

Where The Boys Are is a reflection of far more innocent times coming out in that transition period of the Eisenhower Fifties and the New Frontier. Definitely for fans who came of age in that era.

It's Easter vacation in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. College kids from all over America come to experience the mayhem. Merritt, Melanie, Tuggle and Angie are students from an all-girls Midwestern college who escape the wintery cold and old fashion morality for the sunshine and fun of the Florida beaches where the boys are. They pick up hitchhiker TV Thompson. Merritt is pursued by charismatic rich Ivy Leaguer Ryder Smith (George Hamilton).

The crowds of young kids wouldn't be anything new to anybody now but I'm sure it was something new back in the day. The sexual relationship politics show a movement from the conservative 50's to the sexual liberation of the 60's and beyond. There are elements of both. It's interesting to see the bubbling mix. I can only imagine the discussion that this elicited. The morality is still 50's but the pressure is being applied to the whole courtship structure. As for the music, it is still 50's. The edgier stuff is the jazz hipster set. The actual beach sound would break through a year or two later. This feels like an old movie trying to say something new about the youth. I am surprised by the rape and other edgy situations.

Attractive locales and performers can't compensate for flimsy, uncharismatic story of college girls vacationing in Ft. Lauderdale in search of potential mates; all the gals are chaste except for Yvette Mimieux, whose flirtations are a signal to us that she's in for trouble! Comedy begins OK, but quickly degenerates as the kids start matching up (of all the couples, Connie Francis and Frank Gorshin, playing a nearly-blind jazz musician, are certainly the oddest). The slapstick finale is just stupid, and the cast (including Dolores Hart and Paula Prentiss) strain for laughs. Francis, singing-star making her movie debut, also croons the title tune--the only truly memorable thing in the picture. Remade as a cheesy T&A flick in 1984. *1/2 from ****