Too much of everything

People are voting emotionally.

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

When the one thing that nearly everyone agrees on about a film is the nice Technicolor, you know there's not a lot to offer otherwise. "The Pleasure Seekers is a somewhat typical early '60s romp -- maybe with the idea of men and women bedding down for the night thrown around quite freely -- but this, after all, is Europe! It's Madrid!Yes, it's Spain, where at least a couple of Franco's concentration camps were still in business a few years before the making of this film. It's a cinch that the stuff involving wild hip swingin' Ann-Margaret and a passel of Latin lovers was filmed in Hollywood, and not the Spain of the 1960s. Newspaper publishers still faced a good police grilling for running ads for two-piece swimsuits; Madrinellos would appreciate three American women cruising the town, but Francisco and Dona Carmen wouldn't have found it amusing at all.Still, the movie shows that you can have loads of laughs and love in a country run by a fascist dictator, which really exposes it for the false froth it was then and remains today. It was a tired old formula plugged in to give everyone the idea that Spain under Franco wasn't so bad and, for three footloose and fancy American gals, it couldn't be beat. Just don't pay any attention to the Guardia in the leather hats busting into a door down the street.

I saw this movie in a theater in the 1960s when it was released. I soon bought the soundtrack. The music is upbeat and fun, and Ann-Margret's purring voice in several of the songs were worth the $3.50 or whatever soundtracks cost back then. I wish I still had the vinyl LP, but I left it behind years ago for lack of space, and I have often wished I hadn't. The cover shot of Ann-Margret dancing in a hot pink ruffled dress, if I remember correctly, should have been sufficient cause for me to hold onto it.Ann-Margret dominates any film she's in, but Carol Lynley and Pamela Tiffin were also lusciously beautiful. I had forgotten Gene Tierney was in the cast, but now I remember her bitchy vignette (type casting, from what I read about her).I wish 20th Century Fox would release this film on DVD. I'd love to see it again.

The hair, the clothes, the accents, the song and dance numbers by Ann-Margret -- really, what's not to love in this film? Yeah, it's silly, yeah, it's little outdated in gender relations, but who cares? The styling is excellent, Ann-Margret sings her heart out, and the guys are cute. I wanted to buy this DVD the first time I saw the film, but haven't been able to find it for sale anywhere. Please, powers that be, make this film available for sale!!!!!!

I so enjoy teasing a friend of mine about his long-time and, let's face it, abject adoration of the Swedish bombshell, Ms. A-M. This one was shown on American Movie Classics recently, "formatted" (Why do they bother?!?), which reduces one's visual pleasure by approximately 50%! But even without a forty-foot wide screen to celebrate her astonishingly talented assets, Annie is something to behold. When she waggles that tush...well, it's no wonder she performs almost all of her musical numbers indoors on studio sets. The censorious Spanish would have had her arrested! It rivals "Viva! Las Vegas" as her finest hour!As an artifact of times long gone, this is still fairly enjoyable. Today's young ingenues seem like such tired-out, world weary ladies of the evening compared to the virginal Miss Tiffin, the ambitious Miss Lynley and the incomparable Miss Margret. (Eat your heart out, J. Lo!) And with Brian Keith and Gene Tierney on hand to attest that those beyond their thirties could still care for each other (though it takes the scriptwriters until about the final sequence to maneuver them to that realization), one can regretfully observe that we've come a long way from the bright and beautiful early Sixties, and there's not much to crow about on that score.