Superficially a light summer movie about an aging lifeguard reassessing his free-wheeling, womanizing lifestyle as his 15th high school reunion looms on the horizon, the real meat in this odd little film lies in the quiet scenes where Sam Elliott contemplates and reacts to some radical changes in his character's easygoing existence as new opportunities seem to provide the perfect escape from an 8-year term as a lifeguard, and an unwise affair with a seventeen year-old girl named Wendy he himself brands as plain jailbait.

Most of the cast & crew were based in TV, and director Daniel Petrie had already amassed a huge batch of credits from his years in live and episodic TV. The performances are very natural, and the film is admittedly of note today for giving Elliott an early starring role, along with the part of Wendy played by a spunky Kathleen Quinlan. Parker Stevenson also appears as a college kid learning the ropes of lifesaving from Elliott, and the small role foreshadows Stevenson's ten-year term on the hit boobs and bathing suit show Baywatch.

Although Lifeguard deals with a thirtysomething stud's early midlife crisis, the film can also be regarded as another offshoot of the surfing movie, albeit a less glamorous and romanticized entry; whereas Big Wednesday (basically John Milius' own version of American Graffiti) dealt with local legends and old buddies regrouping for one big surf, Lifeguard puts the magnifying glass on an ex-champion surfer who settled into a less romantic career, kind of got lazy, put away his surfboard, and faded into anonymity while old friends followed more traditional paths and got married, had a family, and earn higher pay as suits. (Elliott's classic bachelor pad is appropriately very Spartan, and the walls are decorated with various surfing imagery, including a half-visible poster of Bruce Brown's classic 1966 surfing documentary, The Endless Summer.)

The dialogue by Ron Koslow (Into the Night) is trite and banal, and Wendy never develops into anything more than a tempting fling who ultimately pouts, whines, and cries herself out of the story, but it's clear the director and actors sensed they could create some heavier subtext by focusing on slow reactions and moments of contemplation to elevate predictable scenes.

Some of the best underplayed moments are between Elliott and Anne Archer, playing his former high school flame, now grown-up and in charge of her own contemporary art gallery. There's some great bits of subtle self-reflection, reserved reactions, and gazes that collectively manage to convey intimate character details in place of Koslow's dialogue.

Naturally, there are pretty montages crafted from docu-styled beach footage set to music (including a song by Paul Williams), and while they're effective transition devises, most of Dale Menten's score is truly awful. A few simple cues have aged adequately – a solo piano piece and a small orchestral cut are quite effective in conveying the vulnerabilities of Elliott and Quinlan – but the rest of the pop score goes against Elliott‘s increasing unease as he knows he must make hard decisions about the women in his life, and whether to change suits and become a slick-suited Porsche salesman.

Elliott's final choices aren't really surprising (and the pivotal scenes have the depth of an ABC Afterschool Special), but unlike Milius' decision to conclude Big Wednesday with personal tribute to his life-scarred water warriors, Petrie and Koslow seem to have known that for every legendary surfer, there's thousands of guys who put away their boards, and like Elliott, chose to take it easy and settle into an unglamorous lifestyle that for some, is just fine.

After Lifeguard, Sam Elliot went back to TV before his film career got a boost via Peter Bogdanovich's Mask (1985), whereas Parker Stevenson gained cult status playing Frank Hardy in The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries the following year. Quinlan subsequently appeared in a string of Kleenex weepies, which include I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1977), The Promise and The Runner Stumbles (both 1979).

Paramount's transfer is very clean, though it's a shame Lifeguard was given a blah bare bones release, sporting a cover that resembles cut and paste artwork typical of direct-to-video fodder, and Quinlan sporting discontinuous long hair – perhaps the marketing department's sly attempt to mask the film's underage sex element by superficially aging the actress.

© 2008 Mark R. Hasan