Skaterdater (1965)

If you imagine a sort of preppy version of the “Jets” or the “Sharks”, only with skateboards instead of flick-knives then you’ll be on the right track for this really quite unremarkable short feature. A group of early teen lads show off their balancing skills around town until one of them espies - quite clumsily - a girl, then he becomes something of a jelly and a teased one at that. He looks at her, she looks at him, and we look on embarrassed at the early, nervous, stages of their rite of passage. Now some of the photography does show the agility of these often bare-footed boys and there’s a decent score to accompany their wheeled acrobatics, but otherwise this is quite a long seventeen minutes watch and maybe it’s just my age, but I found them both - the lad, especially, just implausibly young and green for us to want to watch their hormones start their lifetime journey. It’s not that it is cheesy, it’s just that it’s cringey.