Shore of a Dream

The Sand Castle (Jerome Hill; De Rochemont) is a gay and whimsical pipe-dream made of nothing more consequential than a boy's day at the beach. Turned loose while his mother goes shopping, the boy (nine-year-old Barry Cardwell) makes a routine protest at having to mind his kid sister (played by Barry's own sister, four-year-old Laurie), then jogs across the sand looking for adventure. Barry's luck is bad; he is pelted by a flock of children who have made themselves a fort. He wanders off moodily, trailed by his tiny blonde caboose. Then he finds a shovel, and inspiration strikes. He heaps up a great pile of sand and begins turning it into a castle.

As the boy works, the day's sun worshipers arrive--a fat man, a skinny woman, a pair of lovers, a fisherman, a pyramid of musclegrowers, an artist who fretfully resketches his picture as the sandcastle takes form and draws admirers. Producer-Director Jerome Hill handles his actors skillfully; his humor comes with little forcing from the naturally ridiculous business of hide toasting. Two women wage a war of radios, a frogman draped in seaweed evokes a squeak of fright from Laurie, a paper nose shade makes the skinny woman look even more like a toucan. The sound is realistically blurred; one hears the sea now and then, and occasionally the scrape of feet on sand or the rubble of unimportant conversation.

Thirty minutes of this would have made a charming short, but Hill takes the chance and imaginatively spins his whimsy to feature length. He calls forth a rainstorm. Everyone leaves the beach except Barry and his sister, who fall asleep under an umbrella beside the castle, which after several hours of work is as magnificent as Mont-Saint-Michel. Till now the film has been black and white; suddenly Barry begins to dream in color. A toy knight boldly marches through the castle and looks in wonder at cut-out caricatures (cleverly drawn by Hill himself) of the day's beach people. There is a grand, nonsensical ball, then an alarum and a flurry of soldiers. Is an enemy approaching? Barry wakes to find, in the black and white world, that his mother is calling him. As he and Laurie leave the beach, the tide washes in, further with each wave, and hungrily consumes the sandcastle.

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