The Flamingo Kid

An almost-lost gem, this delightful, laidback, nostalgic teen comedy catapulted Garry Marshall from one of the most successful TV showrunners of the 1970s into an A-list movie director in the '80s, '90s, and beyond. Set during the summer of 1963 ( the year after American Graffiti takes place and ten years after Porky's is set), The Flamingo Kid was a breath of fresh air for moviegoers of all ages in 1984. The film tells the story of a working-class kid named Jeffrey (Matt Dillon) who forgoes an apprenticeship his father sets up for him at an engineering company to take a summer job at an unrestricted Long Island beach resort called the El Flamingo. Though he starts out just parking cars for the swanky clientele, Jeff quickly becomes a popular fixture at the club, moves up to cabana boy, and is taken under the wing of a slick car salesman and gin rummy player named Phil (Richard Crenna). Phil becomes a kind of father figure to Jeffry, much to the chagrin of his actual father (Marshall's good luck charm, Héctor Elizondo, who appeared in all 18 of the director's movies).

The Flamingo Kid was an outlier in '80s teen cinema, playing far more like a teen picture from the 1970s because its retro setting harkens back to the director’s own youth rather than reflecting and capitalizing on contemporary trends. But Dillon was as contemporary a teen star as you could get in 1984. His track record was unmatched among his peers, from his debut as part of the ensemble in Jonathan Kaplan and Tim Hunter's Over the Edge (1979) to his supporting role in Tony Bill and Alan Ormsby's My Bodyguard (1980) to the series of working-class, mook-stud dreamboats in Little Darlings, Tex, Liar's Moon, The Outsiders and Rumble Fish. When discussing The Outsiders, every young future star who auditioned for Francis Ford Coppola's film of S. E. Hinton's novel talks about how much they idolized Dillon. Like Matt Dillon's screen persona, the movie is refreshingly uncontrived, unsentimental, and seemingly unconcerned with how people perceive it. The Flamingo Kid comes across as utterly comfortable with itself, never desperate to make people laugh or applaud, which surprised most critics at the time since it was made by the guy behind the unabashedly broad and popular Happy Days and Lavern and Shirley.

In addition to the story of Jeffrey's dubious mentorship, the film follows his romance with the beautiful Carla Sampson (a gorgeous though not especially talented Janet Jones) as well as the various stories of the guys he knows whose parents are members of the club or who he works with parking cars. Each of the supporting characters (played by Brian McNamara, Fisher Stevens, Leon Robinson, and Bronson Pinchot) has their own internal life and a more developed narrative line than was typical in movies of this ilk. The scenes of Jeffery at home with his family back in their working-class Brooklyn neighborhood have a nice lived-in feel that contrasts sharply with the private club's colorful opulence and escapism. Jeffery's idiosyncratic habits, like making sing-songy noises when he chews his food, play out differently in the various environments he navigates in this story, yet they always seem to serve him well.

I always think of this picture as an older brother to Dirty Dancing because both films take place in 1963, and both feel drawn from the personal experiences of their writers. Just as Dirty Dancing builds to its dynamic dance sequence, The Flamingo Kid builds to a high-stakes card game in which the underestimated protagonist gets to show their stuff. Despite the film's somewhat wholesome nature, this movie will forever be noteworthy as the first film to be officially rated PG-13, though it was the fourth film of 1984 to be released under the new MPAA classification that would go on to define so much of mainstream filmmaking in the decades that followed. This is also one of those acclaimed pictures people point to when disputing the absurd claim that "everything is available streaming these days." This film has never been on a streamer, nor has there been a Blu-Ray or a DVD that wasn't just a reprinting of the old SD laserdisc transfer. Still, that double-sided 1.33:1 letterboxed DVD is better than nothing!