Having a Wild Weekend

This follows the footsteps of The Beatles who released A Hard Day's Night a year earlier. This is The Dave Clark 5 having a wild weekend. As early rivals of the Beatles, they are not as charismatic or as successful. As a rock band, they had a good run but can't compare with the cultural earthquake of The Beatles. Few can.

The plot of this is relatively uninspired but that's not the real issue. The guys live together in a flat. Dinah is tired of her shooting a meat commercial and runs away with Steve (Dave Clark) who steals the Jaguar from the lot. They have a crazy adventure.

At the end of the day, Dave Clark is not a big enough personality. I'm not sure if he's even happy to be there. At least, the other guys are trying to be funny. The girl is pretty with good energy. The Beatles were having fun with the camera. Dave's not having fun with the material. This is a fascinating music time capsule and an intriguing comparison study between one icon and one also-ran.

John Boorman in his first outing as a director, he does a reasonable job of capturing the media and fashion scene in 1965. He also presents some great shots of the handsome, iconic locations in London, Bath and then Devon. Filmgoers can clearly see the similarities of this film, with Dick Lester's Beatles 1964 film, 'Hard Days Night' by the frantic scurrying around by Dave and his group in an attempt to give the film energy. Nevertheless, under Boorman's direction the film has pace and tempo, hence never allowing scenes to drag. However, like all films with pop singers and groups, the acting is substandard. The problem for Boorman was to have the group hanging around locations while in the background, Dave Clark as Steve, is grabbing all the action as well as the beautiful model, played by Barbara Ferris. At times I felt sorry for them, as they were never more than shadows, gawping at Dave as he had all the lines. The storyline is thin and lacks sparkle. Ferris comes across as a bit of an airhead model and Dave Clark, as Steve, looks sullen, moody and plain miserable for most of the time. His acting is rather wooden and as he had the lead role, watching the film is heavy going. With a dull and melancholy storyline, I found the whole thing uninspiring and pretentious.

I'd heard a lot about this film before I ever had the chance to see it. I was predisposed to be dismissive.

However, when I finally DID see it, I was taken quite aback.

The director, John Boorman, is very negative about this film in his recent autobiography. I must disagree. There is a lazy school of thought that sees this movie as a straight rip-off of "A Hard Day's Night". Again, I dissent.

When I sat down to watch this film I expected something approximating to the stock descriptions: derivative, formulaic, just going through the motions.

I was quite unprepared for the reality of "Catch Us If You Can", which is a far more challenging and rule-breaking movie than its reputation would suggest. (I can only suppose that some people see what they expect to see.)

It surprised me that a vehicle for a pop band should be so downbeat and thought-provoking. Another IMDb reviewer rightly drew attention to the wintriness of this film.

There are two vital encounters in the film, once Steve (Dave Clark) and Dinah (Barbara Ferris) have fled from the TV commercial they are meant to be filming. The first is with a collection of hippie-esque drop-outs hiding out in rural ruins, the second with a middle-aged couple in a large townhouse in the affluent spa-town of Bath.

Their moves are monitored at a remove by a sinister advertising man, Leon Zissell, who seems to have a Svengali-like preoccupation with Dinah. To this end he dispatches two henchmen to pursue the errant couple. The elder of the two (not THAT old, as somebody remarks - probably in his mid-30s) is loyal, but at a fancy dress party in Bath his younger colleague readily succumbs to the charms of a pretty young lady.

I could try to encapsulate the plot of this film, but what matters far more is its atmosphere. Steve and Dinah are travelling (initially in a stolen E-Type Jag) towards an island off England's Devon coast that Dinah - young and successful - is contemplating buying. (This island conceit must be a straight lift from "La Dolce Vita", where the actress Marcello Mastroianni's character is "servicing", dreams of buying just such an island.)

The soundtrack is surpisingly strong. There are some straightforward songs from the Dave Clark Five, but otherwise they strive to provide something less stamped with the band style.

Like one of the other IMDb reviewers, I would have to agree, having seen this film, that it is actually stronger, viewed simply as a film, than "A Hard Day's Night". (Where it obviously falls down is the fact that its soundtrack - excellent as it actually is - is NOT by The Beatles.)

Don't patronise this movie, or damn it with faint praise. Don't condemn it for not being what it isn't (a Beatles film), but rejoice in the boldness of its departure from the Cliff-Beatles formula.

The scene in Bath with Robin Bailey and Yootha Joyce is worth the price of admission alone!

I was surprised in a positive way. In judging a 60s British pop film it's only fair to look beyond the Beatles at the wider canon and it contains some proper turkeys, stiff, cliched and beyond banal. Occasionally though filmmakers at least tried to be interesting and off-the-wall and this is one of those occasions. It doesn't always work and it's a bit flat in places but it definitely has its moments. The segment with the proto-hippies (or evolving beatniks) is particularly fascinating as a snapshot of a cultural undercurrent entering the mainstream consciousness. As with all films part of its appeal is in what, even unwittingly, the film shows us of the period in which it was made. As other reviewers have noted in that respect there are some revealing shots of of some very bemused members of the public in what is presumably London, all grey and very unSwinging. So not great but well worth sitting through.

John Boorman's first feature, obviously thrown together as a cash in on "A Hard Day's Night"; shows his skill and promise as a director from the

get go. Dave Clark (of the Dave Clark Five) and a model who could be the girl George Harrison dismisses in the agent's office in "Hard Day's Night; take off on a holiday weekend across England as her obsessive manager trys to hunt her down.

In a series of scenes that seem halfway improvised, they run into aimless young people, uptight middle class folks, and others. The movie goes out of it's way to portray these people as, well, people and not "types", i.e. mods or rockers, hips or squares. There is a silly romp section around the roman baths at Bath.

The Dave Clark Five, the reason for the whole movie, are kept in the background even more than the Spencer Davis Group in "The Ghost Goes Gear." Only three songs are heard, but they're not bad. An interesting neither fish nor fowl entry, should be seen by British Invasion fans or fans of Boorman( I'm both).