Finders Keepers

This is the Cliff Richard & the Shadows movie that was made at the time when the Beatles & their ilk were all the rage.

In response, this film has Cliff Richard with his hair combed forward and moves The Shadows to a more prominent role as songwriters, actors, and singers.

The movie is very colorful and beautiful to look at, has the vintage mid sixties madcap feel, mid sixties styling, and is clean cut & wholesome.

Those looking for deep meanings & complicated plot lines had better stick to other movie genres. This is teenybopper stuff.

What's secretly special about this film is The Shadows' vocal contributions which are in league with those on their excellent SHADOW MUSIC album.

I saw this film just the once, when it first came out and I was in my teens. I remember it being on a par with Cliff's other films - enjoyable, colourful, escapist nonsense, enhanced with some good songs.

But what has happened to it? The Young Ones, Summer Holiday, and Wonderful Life have all featured regularly on British TV and have had video and DVD releases, yet Finders Keepers has disappeared almost without trace (this is also true of Cliff's subsequent films Take Me High and Two A Penny, but they weren't musicals: Finders Keepers is.

The film's songs are all good. Written by the Shadows, they are mostly cheerful and plot-relevant, and they include the haunting This Day, a ballad performed while boating through subterranean caverns, I think. The soundtrack is well worth a listen.

Personally, I'd welcome an opportunity to see the darn thing again.

Addition: I have acquired a somewhat under the radar DVD of Finders Keepers - dubbed from an off-air VHS taping, I suspect. The songs are, indeed, all very good. The rest of the film, alas, is not. The plot is ludicrous, the script is poor, people behave in all sorts of illogical ways, and even the British comedy stalwarts are ill-treated by what they are given to do (I never thought I would report that John Le Mesurier wasn't very good but, sadly, it is so). And the editing of the climactic musical number is shambolic.

Last and least of Cliff Richard's trio of travelogues, it's actually of far greater interest as writer Michael Pertwee's second satire on the arms race of the sixties (the first being 'The Mouse on the Moon').

The same subject of a lost nuclear bomb was dealt with again the next year in the far more pretentious but much sillier 'The Day the Fish Came Out'.

I caught FINDERS KEEPERS on The Mystery Channel, of all things. Well, spies and a missing mini atom bomb *do* figure in the plot, so I guess it's not *totally* out of place on the Mystery Channel lineup... :-) I have sort of a chart for rock 'n' roll comedies, with the following ratings: A HARD DAY'S NIGHT is my "Excellent" rating, HELP! is "Very Good," Elvis Presley's DOUBLE TROUBLE is "Good," THE GHOST GOES GEAR is "Fair," and CATALINA CAPER is "Poor." I place FINDERS KEEPERS somewhere between DOUBLE TROUBLE and THE GHOST GOES GEAR! :-) As screen presences, Cliff Richard and the Shadows don't quite have the sparkle of The Beatles, but they're still pretty cute and amiable, and they're surrounded by such fine British character actors as Robert Morley and Graham Stark. Also, it's sort of oddly endearing to see a film from such an innocent era that an A-bomb can be used as a comic McGuffin (unlike in the recent unfairly underrated BIG TROUBLE; most audiences are too spooked to appreciate the satiric possibilities in their cynically funny, Billy Wilder-esque treatment of atomic bombs and laissez faire airport security...but I digress...). And the use of paella as a love song cue is one of the most hilariously hokey rock movie song cues outside of a typical Elvis Presley flick! If you like Cliff Richard and/or the kind of cheerful lighthearted, lightheaded pop music movies they cranked out in the 1950s and '60s, FINDERS KEEPERS is pleasant fare for a lazy afternoon if you happen to stumble across it on cable.

It's now available as a "legitimate" DVD and comes up sparkling. The plot's not up to much but the photography and art direction are excellent and there are a few laughs. It doesn't compare with The Dave Clark Five in the earlier Catch Us If You Can, which has better songs and, despite a much lower budget, a real sense of purpose.