Wonderful Life

OK - The Young Ones was a pleasant enough little movie, with some great songs to hide the pacing problems and weaknesses in the plot. Summer Holiday was a towering success on every level and remains to this day an absolute joy to watch, so just how, only 1 year after that wonderful film, did the same production team manage to make a film so utterly uninteresting and unenjoyable? I mean, I really wanted to like this movie but after several viewings I had to give in and admit that it really is an absolute disaster!

Their first mistake of course was not keeping the same actors from Summer Holiday who all seemed to gel together so well and contribute to the enormous charm of that movie. And bringing the Richard O Sullivan character back from The Young Ones was surely a big mistake. The absence of Teddy Green in Wonderful Life is really felt, big time. I kept hoping he, Jeremy Bulloch and the others from Summer Holiday would appear and turn this monstrosity around, but sadly no. All we have is almost 2 hours of O Sullivan and Hayes irritating the heck out of us and a plot that just drifts with no direction whatsoever.

And this time the songs aren't strong enough to cover up the cracks in the plot. True, there are a few exceptions, notably The Shadows' "Theme for Young Lovers", "On The Beach" and "A Matter of Moments" but they aren't enough to disguise the fact that this is really a terribly disappointing film.

I was a keen Shadows fan and saw this film when it came out and didn`t understand what on earth it was about. Now I am 50yrs old and still can`t make head nor tail of it. Funny, in a recent BBC radio documentary Susan Hampshire said she didn`t know what it was about and the only thing she remembers is the director throwing sheets of script out of his car window as it was re-written on as daily basis.

High spot "Theme for Young Lovers" by the Shadows, great melody written by Bruce Welch.

Wonderful Life was reportedly a huge hit in 1964 because of the immense popularity of its star, Cliff Richard. Sadly, it hasn't stood the test of time very well at all and when I caught up with it in 2024, it reflected very poorly on the movie-making of the day.

However, it is not without its merits. Around the beginning of the second hour of the movie, there is a humorous and nostalgic look at the history of the cinema, with Cliff, The Shadows, Susan Hampshire and Una Stubbs reviving memories of screen legends such as Charlie Chaplin, the Keystone Cops, Rudolf Valentino, the Marx Brothers, Greta Garbo, Douglas Fairbanks, Rhett Butler & Scarlett O'Hara and all the way through to James Bond and Ursula Andress. Cliff and Susan Hampshire in particular shine brightly through this segment. And, indeed, Susan Hampshire shines brightly throughout the film.

If you can hold on through the corny plot, the movie nostalgia scene is worth waiting for. If you can't stand the nonsense in the first half of the film, fast-forward to this scene.

This is the third in a series of Cliff Richard films and the weakest of the lot. 'The Young Ones' was fun, 'Summer Holiday' was great, but by this time the screenwriters knew they had to make a film but didn't know what it should be about. In the end it's about nothing much at all. The music is flat for the most part and closer to show music than rock'n'roll.

It's not surprising that they didn't make a fourth.

When the UK game show 'Pointless' asked contestants to name a Cliff Richard film in 2014, "Wonderful Life" would have won them the jackpot, because no one remembered this – Cliff's fifth film – fifty years on, and yet it was a film that changed things. After the poor reception and disappointing box office results of this one – it only eventually clawing its budget back in 1987 – Cliff abandoned his trademark quiff and instead went for a Beatle style comb forward. His support team of Melvyn Hayes, Richard O'Sullivan and Una Stubbs were dropped (although Una did later co-star with him in a TV adaptation of 'Aladdin') and there was a two year gap before Cliff and the Shadows (who had never been really used properly in his films) returned to the big screen with "Finders Keepers". And yet in 2015 I find myself strangely drawn towards this film despite – or maybe because of – its flaws of overproduction, poor acting, dull and unbelievable story and director Sydney J Furie's obsession with a new zoom lens. Susan Hampshire is so attractive. She bats her eyes and smiles and goes along with it all in a nice playful spirit – knowing it was rubbish bit determined to at least make people enjoy her performance. Cliff is Cliff. He sings some songs, most of which are terrible – but especially good is 'Matter Of Moments' – but Cliff never really looks at ease. Walter Slezak roars and shouts and gets it right. He plays a past it director with a sensitivity he hides until the end.

Many years later when I started writing about old films, I asked a friend to watch it for me and give me an opinion – but he called back a week later to say that although he tried, he had never gotten beyond the opening fifteen minutes.

Here's what I wrote about it in my book "What We Watched In The 1960s (In The Cinema)" when it arrived in Glasgow during week commencing 9th August 1964.

When the Beatles started dominating the charts, Cliff Richard's image took a bit of a dent and it certainly wasn't helped with the timing of the release of "Wonderful Life" at the ABC Regal and Green's Bedford. "The Young Ones" had been a breakthrough musical and "Summer Holiday" had seen him at his film peak, but "Wonderful Life" tried to repeat the formula once too often and the plot of a load of old looking youngsters working at a movie location making their own film looked just daft. On top of that coming to town a couple of weeks after "Hard Day's Night" accentuated the gap between what young people wanted to see now, compared to the sort of all-round-entertainment on show here with dance routines that went on too long, show songs like 'Home' which would have been booed off at a music hall and a lengthy sequence on the history of cinema which brings the film to a shuddering halt. The film had been troubled with weather problems in the Canaries and original support choice Dennis Price had been fired allegedly for drinking and replaced by Glasgow born Derek Bond, and the only Cliff hit song was 'On The Beach'. Susan Hampshire (who had had a small part in "Expresso Bongo") and Walter Slezak co-starred, but this put Cliff's film career on hold for a couple of years. "A Woman's Privilege" with it was one of the 'Scales Of Justice' series about a bachelor who sues a girl who dupes him.

Jim Doyle is the author of 'What We Watched In The 1960s (In The Cinema)', 'What We Watched In The 1970s (In The Cinema)" and 'What We Watched In The 1980s (In The Cinema And On Video)'