Jacques Boyreau is the author of the forthcoming The Male Mystique and Trash: The Graphic Genius of Xploitation Movie Posters (2002). He is also the founder of the Werepad, a San Francisco microcinema.

Got sunblock? Hunky Sam Elliott in the role of his career plays Rick, the eponymous sentinel of the surf in Daniel Petrie's board-and-sandals epic Lifeguard. Held by some to be a strangely perceptive portrait of ebbing testosterone, the film's breezy yet brooding yarn of a lifeguard's midlife bends is anything but sunny. It's more a seventies replay of Burt Lancaster in The Swimmer than an entry in the beach blanket cycle. Our aging beach boy Rick is almost 33-that's a lot of tubes of Sea and Ski. Young and restless teen titillator Wendy (Kathleen Quinlan) likes him just the way he is, elbows in the sand. Seductive divorcee Cathy (Anne Archer), on the other hand, hankers for a place not in the sun. From the shallows of his life, Rick wonders if it's time to trade in his beach balls for a briefcase. Hot on the heels of his new book, Jacques Boyreau will talk about the “male mystique” as it struts sun-soaked through Lifeguard, a subversive surf fest from the “heyday of experimental chauvinism.”