Janet Maslin's review for Big Wednesday ran in the July 28, 1978, issue of the New York Times.

It wasn't very long ago that John Milius's expensive, ambitious "Big Wednesday" was one of the more widely touted movies on the horizon, so what's it doing sneaking into Flagship theaters for only a weeklong run? The honorable thing, that's what. "Big Wednesday" isn't even a tiny fraction of what it was once cracked up to be.

The surprise is not that Mr. Milius has made such a resoundingly awful film, but rather that he's made a bland one. Mr. Milius's reputation, after all, rests at least as heavily on his well-publicized walk-softly-and-carry-an-elephant gun worldview as it does on his several screenplays and his direction of "Dillinger" and "The Wind and the Lion." So one might have supposed that "Big Wednesday," his epic about surfing and buddyhood, would have boasted at least enough trigger-happy machismo to make it controversial. True, "radical" is something of a dirty word in the "Big Wednesday" screenplay Mr. Milius co-wrote with Dennis Aaberg. And Jan-Michael Vincent, as one of the three legendary surfers a narrator describes as "the big names, the kings, our own royalty," has a strident hippie-baiting scene during the segment of the film that's set in 1968. Mr. Vincent, outraged to find that his favorite hangout now serves organic food instead of cheeseburgers, and that a waiter in a butterfly-patterned undershirt keeps calling him "brother," douses the incense on his table with water and cautions the waiter to turn down the music. This, plus a scene that shows the three surfers quietly watching the Watts riots on television, is about as much of a nod "Big Wednesday" cares to give the real world.

But it's not just the film's rapt attention to wave patterns that makes it so emphatically all wet. Mr. Milius's three adventurers, whom we watch over the course of 12 years and still never get to know, have an unbecoming horror of growing up, not just of growing old. "It's really different here," gushes a girl from Chicago who is just becoming initiated to the glories of beach life in L.A. "Back home, being young was just something you'd do until you grew up. Here—it's everything!"

Being young means different things to our three respective heroes. For Leroy (Gary Busey), it's a chance to experience the joys of painting his torso with what looks like barbecue sauce and then trying to crawl into an oven. For Jack (William Katt), it's going to Vietnam for three years and then coming home expecting an old girlfriend to be a current girlfriend, even though he hasn't kept in close enough touch with her to find out she's now married. For Matt (Mr. Vincent), it means saying everything he needs to say through very careful flexing of the neck and the nostrils. For all of them, being young means acquiring a kind of oral history of wavesmanship from a senior surfer named Bear.

Bear tells his biggest, saddest story at a party early in the film, after everyone has finished pouring beer on everyone else's head. He tells his much-too-solemn audience about a time when "the water was hittin' the cliffs and splashin' 100 feet high—it was like the end of the world." A surfer disappeared that day, and "they never found his body—they just found little pieces of his board."

The movie often seems even more uneventful than material like this need make it, and Mr. Milius's attention to his actors focuses more closely on their pectorals than on their performances. He encourages such stiffness in his players that Barbara Hale, for instance, is quite unconvincing as Mr. Katt's mother. This is a 

 of no mean eminence; after all, Miss Hale actually 

The score for the film includes a number of hit songs from the early '60s, which makes the absence of any "surf music" of that period worth noting. Surely the Beach Boys or Jan and Dean were just as deeply in love with the sport as Mr. Milius, and for them, too, it had connotations of masculine daring. However, it also had a spirit of fun. And there's no room for real levity or pleasure in Mr. Milius's grim, dispirited and too often incoherent scheme of things.

"Big Wednesday" is rated PG ("Parental Guidance Suggested") apparently because its characters' pranks tend to be violent, and their language slightly rough.

"BIG WEDNESDAY GETS CAUGHT IN SOME ROUGH SURF," NYT REVIEW BY JANET MASLIN (1978)

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