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Like many people, I knew The Endless Summer’s poster first. So symbolic of 1960s neon that a print of it is featured in the Smithsonian and also the home sections of many a style-minded big-box store, the design, by then-art student John Van Hamersveld, depicts a trio of surfers striding toward the shore to enjoy the afternoon’s waves. Van Hamserveld trades the nuances of shades and shadows for something more evocative and straightforward. The sand is bright red, the sky is magenta-pink, and the sun is tangerine-yellow, the surfers’ silhouettes an inky black. The uncomplicated design complements the rather black-and-white way its subjects approach life: with little concern besides surfing and the pleasures it provides.

Released in the summer of 1966 but using footage dating back to years before, The Endless Summer was the breakthrough film from documentarian Bruce Brown, who had for nearly a decade been making less-seen projects about sulf culture, a milieu that had fascinated him since he was a kid. Essentially a silent film, with narration provided by Brown, The Endless Summer follows several surfers whom we disappointingly never actually hear from as they attempt to find the perfect wave. They travel to more obvious places like Australia and “land of an endless summer” Hawaii, as well as less-so locales like Senegal and Nigeria. The act of going to and from different-hemisphered places with opposite summer seasons is where the title comes from. 

The footage is frequently beautiful. I could watch the mountain-high waves crash at O’ahu’s Waimea Bay for hours, something also true of the glass-smooth, almost mystically slow-moving waters encountered in South Africa. (The latter also sees a charming appearance from a fleet of porpoises that couldn’t care less about the watersport they’re interrupting.) But the film is consistently undermined by narration as much hampered by insincere-sounding travel-agency friendliness as unbearable white-guy myopia that rears its ugly head the most during the film’s African beach visits. Rather than try to learn anything about the cultures on which he’s intruding, Brown prefers to glibly reinvoke ideas of them being hopelessly folksy and primitive. Condescendingly exoticized, Les Baxter-imitating percussions play in the background to further set the patronizing tone.

The Endless Summer is, of course, not a movie designed to be an anthropological survey of the places visited. It’s more about uncovering the places whose waters are friendliest to eager surfers and their generously waxed-up boards — about summoning the ephemeral, typically youthful feeling of there being nothing more to live for than the thrills of a wave. Sometimes the film is as good of a time as it intends to be — especially during the back half, which uses much better (and waterproof) cameras blessedly able to be planted on the bodies of surfboards in action — but during its unintentionally racist sections you’re thinking less about the pursuit animating the movie than you are the white obliviousness it takes to not only travel somewhere with a mindset reminiscent of a stunt, but also broadcast that insularity with the slant of it being somehow funny.

The aftermath of the almost unfathomably profitable The Endless Summer was more net good than not. It proved pivotal in popularizing surfing, to the extent of permanently introducing it to places that beforehand were unaware of it. Brown released a spiritual sequel nearly 30 years later tracking how the sport had evolved (e.g., permutations like windsurfing and bodyboarding). That it wasn’t nearly as successful as its predecessor makes sense: only one had the good fortune of being pegged as a cultural breakthrough.