The Pleasure Seekers (1964)

Please don't spend money on this.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

This movie concerns itself with three young American ladies named "Maggie Williams" (Carol Lynley), "Suzie Higgins" (Pamela Tiffin) and "Fran Hobson" (Ann-Margret) who are living it up while trying to make ends meet in Madrid. Although each of them are looking for romance what they eventually find is something much more elusive than they had counted on. For example, Maggie is in love with her boss by the name of "Paul Martin" who also loves her. However, Paul is married and his wife "Jane" (Gene Tierney) has no intention of letting him go without a fight. Likewise, Suzie is in love with a notorious playboy named "Emilio Lacayo" (Anthony Franciosa) who has absolutely no intention of getting married and quickly moves on from one woman to another after he sleeps with them. Fran, on the other hand, has fallen in love with a doctor by the name of "Andres Briones" (Andre Lawrence) who is definitely higher-minded than the other two men but is extremely committed to his work and doesn't believe that Fran can adjust to his serious lifestyle. In short, each of the ladies face certain problems which may prove to be quite insurmountable. Now as far as this movie is concerned I will just say that it definitely benefited from having the three beautiful women just mentioned. All three of them were simply exquisite. Unfortunately, the story moved much too slowly and lacked the sufficient humor necessary for a comedy. Quite honestly, I found this movie to be both long and boring. That said, I have rated it accordingly. Slightly below average.

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.

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.