surfboatdriver Many other viewers have said how much they loved this movie. I don't have the words it seems. I can say I agree. I have several favorite movies, this is another. How could I have never seen the movie? It was made in 1978 but the action is the mid sixties till the later seventies. I was a surfer in the mid sixties. I love surfer movies, OK, this is more of a growing up movie but it's about surfers. Well I wanted to pass along the one thing that caught me about watching this movie. Not all of the rides are the best rides of all time. Some are pretty good but the surfing is more good surfer as opposed to champion surfing. It's real. And another thing, the boards, those are the long boards we used in the sixties and the seventies. Just great. Walking the Board and Hanging Five were the Cat's Meow. They hit it big time on the nail head with Big Wednesday.

bkoganbing Big Wednesday is a celebration of life on the beach as seen through the eyes of three surfing buddies who only live for riding the wave. Gary Busey, Jan Michael Vincent, and William Katt, three blond California surfer types if there ever were are the three pals with a host of supporting surfing types.The film is four vignettes over a 12 year period from 1962 to 1974 and amazing as it seems I did not hear The Beach Boys once over the soundtrack of the film. Quite an accomplishment for director John Milius in and of itself.William Katt is a straight arrow type and and Gary Busey and Jan-Michael Vincent are screw ups to some degree. Vincent has the most interesting character, he's a surfing god when we first meet him, the idol of all, but he doesn't like the acclaim. He goes through more changes than anyone else in the film.Barbara Hale who is William Katt's mother plays his mother her in her last big screen appearance. If she wasn't Della Street for so many years on Perry Mason she might have wound up doing Donna Reed or Barbara Billingsley or Jane Wyatt type roles. I loved her bearing up under it all demeanor while her house is being wrecked with a wild party.Highlight of the film is the scene at the Selective Service induction center. All the young surfers try to avoid the draft, some with some truly creative ideas. William Katt actually goes to war, the other two avoid it, but Katt's not even trying.Second highlight is the Big Wednesday of 1974 where all three try to prove they still have the right stuff for the waves. The waves were tipping on 20 feet.Big Wednesday is a good buddy/buddy/buddy film about three guys who live for what they love, but who have to realize it's a young man's game.

classicsoncall A friend of mine from work mentioned he just dug this film out of a pile of old movies sitting around at home, so I figured what the heck, bring it in and I'll take a look. My date of birth puts me about a decade earlier than the characters in this picture, but still within that baby boomer generation that the film was meant to appeal to. The picture takes a more mature approach than those beach blanket films of the Sixties when young adults had absolutely nothing to worry about. Here the main characters were about to face growing up and out of the sun culture they were so fondly a part of from the early Sixties into the mid-Seventies. The poignancy of the film is represented by local legend Matt Johnson's (Jan-Michael Vincent) unsteady growth out of his teen years, facing a wartime draft and the dissolution of his boyhood band of rowdies. Told from the view of a narrator who's never identified (unless I missed it), the story is told in a series of vignettes that time-jump in rough increments of three years at a time until the denouement of 'Big Wednesday' - that once in a lifetime confluence of moon and tides that produce the biggest waves ever to make their appearance on The Point, an area of California coastline where the story takes place.Seeing the movie's leads, Vincent, Gary Busey and William Katt is an interesting exercise in nostalgia for anyone who's golden age coincides with the Seventies. I don't know about Vincent and Katt, but Busey surely wouldn't fit into those swim trunks anymore. That ever present snarly smile of his was on display throughout a major portion of the picture.I guess if surfing's your thing, this will be an entertaining flick, weaving a handful of the era's great songs into the soundtrack - tunes like 'Locomotion', 'That's What I Want' and 'He's a Rebel' - all cleverly placed to counterpoint the action on screen and the attitudes of the main players. The surfing scenes at the finale are what you'll want to stick around for as the film's hero trio take that last ride into the sunset, figuratively speaking. It's what everyone in the story was waiting for, the Big Wednesday of their lives that could only be described in the jargon of the surfer - "It's a Boss Swell".

jim-314 John Milius's militant conservatism is somewhat subdued in this movie, though the movie was clearly made with a sense of nostalgia for a time when women and African-Americans knew their subjugated place and stayed there, and when going off to die pointlessly in an immoral war was seen as heroic and poignant. It's a film in which people who behave cruelly and stupidly are supposed to be viewed as charming. The script for the film is crude, predictable, and often unintentionally funny, especially in the portentous voice-over sections. The martial soundtrack, which tries to give the movie weight it otherwise lacks, is also unintentionally funny (I dare you not to laugh at the end when our three buddy-boy surfers march into the waves as to war, drums and trumpets blaring all up and down the beach). The performances are one-dimensional, though that's probably more the fault of the script than the actors. On the up side, the bodies are beautiful. Jan-Michael Vincent takes his shirt off as often as possible (as he tended to do in his younger days), and William Katt's youthful sculpted chest was a match for Vincent's. There's some great footage of water, and some fine surfing, though not enough for my taste. The climactic, final surf-scene is worth watching, despite the angsty bromance you have to endure to get there. It might be better with the sound off.