Lifeguard

Rick Carlson is a Los Angeles County lifeguard in his mid-thirties, comfortable in a job that keeps him on the beach and outside the pressures of a conventional career. At his fifteenth high school reunion he runs into Cathy, a former girlfriend who is now divorced and raising a young son. Their relationship rekindles, and Cathy pushes Rick toward a more settled path, including a car sales job arranged through an old classmate. His decision is complicated by a lonely teenage girl, Wendy, who has developed a crush on him, and by the younger guards already crowding behind him for his spot. The film follows Rick as he weighs the life he has built against the one others expect him to want.

Daniel Petrie directed the film, working from a screenplay by Ron Koslow; Ron Silverman produced it for Paramount. It sits between Petrie's A Howling in the Woods and The Betsy in a directing career that began with A Raisin in the Sun. Sam Elliott plays Rick, with Anne Archer as Cathy, Kathleen Quinlan as Wendy, Stephen Young as Larry, Parker Stevenson as Chris Randall and Sharon Clark as Tina, among a credited cast of 39. The film runs 96 minutes and took about 5 million dollars worldwide.

Audience response has been mixed but durable: on IMDb it holds 6.6/10 from roughly 2,100 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 6.1/10 from a much smaller group of 36 voters.