It's time for another of those movies that I recorded from the previous TCM showing, and is now getting another airing on TCM. This time, the movie is Catalina Caper, and the next airing is tomorrow, June 25, at 9:30 AM.
After some cheesy animated opening credits, we get a scene of a guy snooping around a museum late one night, stopping at one of the paintings. Well, technically, it's not a painting; it's a scroll from one or another of the Chinese dynasties, so several hundred years old. The man removes it from its frame, this being the era and the sort of lower-tier museum that doesn't have an alarm on each painting, and is able to get the scroll out of the building without being discovered, more or less.
Cut to the ferry that goes between Southern California and Catalina Island. Bob and Sid are a couple of Harbor Patrol workers seeing that people get on board the ferry safely, before making the trip over to Catalina Island themselves. Among the people on the ferry is the thief from the opening scene, as well as a couple of college guys. Don Pringle (Tommy Kirk) is from Arizona and has apparently never seen the ocean, so he's being brought over to Catlaina by his friend Charlie, who's quite the ladies' man. Another reason Charlie is bringing Don to Catalina is to introduce him to the hot bikini-clad girls who show up on the beaches of Catalina. One last person is an unnamed (until the finale) man played by Robert Donner who provides comic relief but is clearly going to be integral to the plot in some way that is revealed in the finale.
The ferry ride is an excuse to bring in Little Richard to perform a number, on the theory that presumably the teens who were the target audience for a movie like this were still interested in Little Richard even though his heyday had passed several years earlier. And why does he never show up again even though he was on the ferry?
Anyhow, after the ferry makes it to Catalina, the thief makes his way to a yacht owned by Arthur Duval (Del Moore). Arthur commissioned the heist, with the idea that his wife was going to forge a copy of the scroll and sell the forged copy to wealthy Greek collector Lakopoulos. Arthur has a son Tad who is about the same age as Charlie and Don and all the bikini-clad women. He suspects his father is up to no good, but for understandable reasons doesn't want his parents to wind up in prison.
Lakopoulos doesn't plan to pay for the scroll, but steal it. In his attempt to have his henchmen steal it, however, the container in which Duval put it gets thrown overboard, leading to a Lakopoulos' scuba divers trying to find it. The younger set, meanwhile, also scuba dives for pleasure, not knowing that danger lurks beneath the surface. There's also a lot of scenes of those young people doing beach things along with music by a group called the Cascades who had had a hit several years earlier with a song called "Rhythm of the Rain".
Catalina Caper came near the end of the cycle of beach movies, and as far as I can tell was more or less independently produced on the cheap. That shows, as the movie is fairly lousy, with a paper-thin plot that's an excuse to show shots of nubile young women in bikinis. The music is typical for movies of the era: I've seen a whole bunch of movies from the 60s where a character turns on the radio and this instrumental guitar music plays as though this was the popular music of the era. Most of the score is that sort of bland and not very good music. Worst, however, is the acting, which is wooden at best.
I'd guess that the people behind the movie thought they could make a quick buck by cashing in on a trend. They clearly weren't thinking about creating a good movie.
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