Raymie: “Everybody’s Kind of Movie”?

I’ve been noodling out a story about kids in a seaside town, so I tracked down the 1960 movie Raymie for visual inspiration.

Raymie came from Allied Artists Pictures, which grew out of the Monogram, one of the “Poverty Row” studios of the 1930s. Allied still took pride in keeping budgets low. There’s a small cast, a limited number of settings, only one action scene, and not a little stock footage.

I hoped the picture would be an interesting exploration of the young title character, played by Hollywood scion David Ladd. Raymie is indeed at the center of the story, his quest to catch a legendary barracuda defining the plot. But there’s a lot more footage of adults discussing Raymie than of the boy expressing himself. Some scenes are outside of his point of view. I believe Ladd was twelve when the movie was made, but he’s playing a simple nine-year-old.

Instead of a character study, Raymie really lays out the culture of a fishing pier somewhere along the California coast. A bunch of white men who have nothing better to do spend their days fishing off the pier, trading stories and jibes. Raymie’s widowed mother works at a diner on the pier, so he gets to fish, too, without paying.

One of the men is a grouch who dislikes Raymie’s presence. The rest use him as an object of their opinions and advice. There’s a wealthy older man who suffers a health crisis partway through the movie. There’s an African-American worker who shares wisdom in scenes with Ladd and no other actors, making me think they were shot separately and possibly ready to trim for certain audiences. And there’s John Agar as Ike, an off-season construction worker who’s trying to woo Raymie’s mother, played by Julie Adams.

In a vaguely Freudian way, some of the action turns on a fishing knife that Raymie inherited from his late father. (The father died in the Korean War, when the boy was an infant.) After resisting for two-thirds of that movie, Raymie trades that knife for the bait he needs to catch the barracuda. Then at the climactic moment he picks up Ike’s knife instead. That change presages how Raymie’s mother, seeing Ike standing up for her son, finally accepts him as a suitor.

Raymie’s mother doesn’t know that, much earlier in the movie, Ike dove off the pier to protect her son from a shark. Presumably she would have warmed up to him earlier if she were aware. But all the men on the pier, and Raymie, conspired to deceive her about how he got knocked into the water. In other words, the pier culture stretched out the movie.

The Raymie theme song was recorded by Jerry Lewis, then at the height of his stardom. He was even featured on the posters, as shown above. I’ve seen reports that a legal dispute over that recording has prevented the movie from being rereleased in any new format. Whether or not that’s true, in order to watch Raymie I had to download a bootleg file made from a scratched 16mm print found a few years back in Australia. It’s available for the curious, but I’m not recommending it as a sadly lost classic.