Ski Party 1965

Todd Armstrong Frankie Avalon and Craig Gamble Dwayne Hickman are college undergraduates from California whose romantic entanglements with Linda Hughes Deborah Walley and Barbara Norris Yvonne Craig aren’t smooth. The group centers on the charming, arrogant, athletic classmate Freddie Aron Kincaid, who, as president of the Ski Club, has no trouble attracting attention from multiple women. He books a midterm vacation to ski country, sending Todd and Craig along with Linda and Barbara on a bus trip to see Freddie’s technique in action, even though none of them know much about skiing.

At the rustic ski resort, Todd and Craig adopt disguises—frumpy, non-threatening Englishwomen named Jane and Nora—to observe the dynamics among the group and try to figure out where Freddie’s hold over the women stems from. They’re not alone in their antics: the lodge presents a backdrop of quirky interruptions, including a mysterious ice-skating, yodeling polar bear and the lederhosen-clad, psychologically imbalanced lodge manager Mr. Pevney [Robert Q. Lewis]. The two couples watch and learn, hoping to recover Linda’s and Barbara’s affections by uncovering the mistakes that Freddie exploits.

To stir Linda’s jealousy, Todd catches the eye of Nita [Bobbie Shaw Chance], a gorgeous Swedish ski instructor who is anything but typical. Todd’s genuine self, when seen, contrasts with Freddie’s relentless pursuit of Craig, who is disguised as the enigmatic Nora. Nita manages to persuade Todd to enter a ski jump against Freddie, a decision that culminates in disaster: Todd’s jump forces Craig to shoot him down, leaving Todd with a broken leg.

Bruised and bound for the lodge, Todd crawls through miles of deep snow late at night, his plaster cast covering a leg that hurts far more than the cold. He reaches Nita’s house, where he discovers that her alluring persona hides a longing to be treated like a real “American girl”—talk more than action, softening the hard-edged chase Freddie represents. The truth of her swagger becomes a little clearer, even as the pain of Todd’s injury lingers.

Back at the lodge, Freddie’s fixation on Craig’s supposed Nora grows. He tries to break down Nora’s door, driven by a crucial mix of jealousy and obsession. With the door stuck, Todd and Craig weigh their options and escape through a window. They grab a taxi and, aided by the chaos of their spring-break misadventure, head north toward Santa Monica, California. Freddie trails on a moped piloted by the fur-coated lodge manager Pevney [Robert Q. Lewis], and the rest of the group scrambles to keep up as the spontaneous chase unfolds.

Eventually, Todd, Linda, Craig, and Barbara reach Todd’s parents’ beachfront home in Santa Monica, reuniting with the others and Pevney along the way. There, the two couples finally lay bare their true feelings and reveal the ruse that brought them to the ski trip in the first place. Freddie, meanwhile, hurls himself into the Pacific Ocean, calling out to his imagined Nora, who, as Craig explains, heard of his arrival and started swimming “somewhere between here and Japan.” Craig hints that perhaps she’s already moved on, “somewhere near Guam,” leaving Freddie to chase a dream that has drifted too far away.

As the audience watches the reconciliation unfold, Craig breaks the fourth wall with a closing line that hints at what’s to come: the pair plan to tell Freddie everything the next day, a playful reminder that the whole wild scheme was about learning, growing, and perhaps, finding a more mature way to handle love.

“Pretty mean thing to do,” Craig says to the audience, reassuring us that they will tell Freddie everything tomorrow. “If he comes back…”