Having a Wild Weekend

Trailer—Having a Wild Weekend

source: Having a Wild Weekend

When I was a kid, this is the movie I remember seeing in the theater. I never got to see the Beatles "Hard Day's Night" on the big screen. That being said, I thought this was a better movie than some other films I saw at that age. It was definitely better than the typical beach movies the US was producing with Leslie Gore singing "Sunshine, Lolipops". While I never saw the Beatles film then, once I did, I don't understand the comparison. "Hard Days Night" was about The Beatles trying to escape their rabid fans. The DC5 film here is more about having a wild week-end and trying to get away from the cops. The theme song, "Catch Us If You Can" caught on big in the US as it went up the pop charts. I remember at one time owning the soundtrack vinyl album of this move, along with earlier stuff like "Glad All Over" and "Because". This movie did pretty well in the US but the DC5 then seemed to run out of a stream of music here trying to compete with the Beatles and Roliing Stones. Then in 1966 the Pre-Fab 4, The Monkees hit the charts. To me the most inspired moments in this are the costume party. It presents some pretty good light comedy. You can tell this is a British film because there are some scenes of Barbara Ferris at camera angles the codes in the US did not allow then. She looks and acts well in this film.

Dave Clark and his four accompanying musicians seemed to drift out of the limelight towards the end of the 1960s. It is possible that their music did not evolve into the style of 1970s and 80s, unlike contemporary musicians such as Cliff Richard, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. I would like to write a few words on what the film was about, but it did not seem to have a definitive storyline. The film seemed to be a Rabelaisian romp around London and the South West of England, with the boys meeting many strange and eccentric characters along the way. The location work was quite admirable, depicting what life was like in England during the Swinging Sixties. It is a pity that some of the scenes were not shot in Technicolour. I can only assume that it was some kind of "art" film that they made in the 1960s, copying the French style of film making - not made to entertain nor enthral, but simply made to look at and admire, whilst enjoying the incidental music that softly flowed throughout the film. Out of the many well-known actors and actresses that appeared in the film, it was nice to see Yootha Joyce and Barbara Ferris in one of their earlier films. I must say that I only just recognised a very young Clive Swift as some sort of private investigator. He will always be remembered for playing Patricia Routledge's long-suffering husband in the very funny television comedy: "Keeping Up Appearances". One of the faces that intrigued me was that of the man who played the boss of the advertising company, Leon Zissell. Although his face has never been easily recognisable, his distinctive voice seems to have been everywhere in films. The actors name is David de Keyser and he has always been a reliable voice actor, dubbing the tones of many foreign actors who have had difficulty being understood when saying their lines in English. He is most famous for having dubbed the voice of the actor, John Forbes-Robertson, when he played the part of Dracula in "The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires", released in 1974. Many of us may remember hearing his voice in a lot of foreign programmes that have been dubbed and presented on British Television. Going back to the film, to be fair, I would like to give "Catch Us If You Can" 8 out of 10. It is worth watching, if not just out of curiosity. Just enjoy watching The Dave Clark Five, and enjoy listening to their lovely incidental music that was played beautifully throughout the film.

British rock band the Dave Clark Five gets to do its own version of A Hard Day's Night with Having A Wild Weekend. The film is replete with many of their well known hits of the day just as the Beatles' classic. Front man Dave Clark works as a stuntman and the other members of the group are his flat mates. They have quite a pad too. While working on a commercial model Barbara Ferris who has become the British symbol via the ad campaign for meat just gets tired of it and she and Clark decide to just split for a bit. Nothing more to tell other than this was the first feature film directed by John Boorman who would go on to do many more hit films including a favorite of mine Zardoz. Fans of the group you will love this as much as Fab Four fans love A Hard Day's Night.

Made as a vehicle for the Dave Clark Five with the intent of capturing the success of the Beatles' Hard Days Night, this movie starts out looking like a surprisingly stylish knock off but turns out to be something very different; a melancholy and sometimes lyrical satire or mid-60s England. The band plays stunt men working on an ad campaign with it girl Barbara Ferris. While Hard Days Night was an ensemble, this movie soon becomes a road picture of Dave and Barbara headed to a deserted island. In rock-movie style they do wacky things, but they also find themselves traveling past rusted war machines and hobnobbing with stoners. It is very much a mid-60s English movie, generally reminiscent more of Richard Lesters' "The Knack and How to Get It" than his earlier "Hard Day's Night." The relationship between Barbara and Dave is neatly expressed in an early scene where Barbara imagines Gatsby-like parties on the island while Dave considers what supplies they would need. She is about the journey, he is about the destination, and his matter-of-fact manner contrasts with Barbara's poetic nature (at one point she says a deserted hotel "smells like dead holidays." The weakness of Catch Us If You Can is that it wavers between a surreal and satiric melancholy and the wacky burlesque of scenes like costume part that runs riot. While this feels more like a real movie than a band vehicle - unlike Hard Day's Night, which for all it's brilliance was a fairly plotless excuse for a bunch of songs), the band vehicle moments come through, most notably in the insistence of keeping the rest of the band around without every establishing their characters. While episodic and uneven in tone, the film should be considered a mid-60s counter-culture classic.

CATCH US IF YOU CAN is a kind of spiritual successor to the Beatles' A HARD DAY'S NIGHT, with John Boorman directing in pseudo-documentary style as he follows the Dave Clark Five on a kind of road trip as they work for an advertising company selling...meat. It doesn't sound very exciting and it really isn't, as the singers don't have really anything in the way of screen presence and their dialogue is constantly stilted and more than a little annoying. The saving grace is the presence of real actors in support, including the likes of Ronald Lacey, Clive Swift and David Lodge, but their roles are eclipsed by the tedium of the main stars.

I remember what a big deal the city of Kenosha made when "A Hard Day's Night" played at the Orpheum downtown theater. "Having a Wild Weekend," on the hand, blew through the area before I had a chance to see it. I think I have watched the movie from start to finish maybe four times in forty years. I like the film but it's no "A Hard Days Night." 1) The Beatles were far superior to the Dave Clark Five musically by the time the two movies were released. 2) Ringo as a leading character is vastly more enjoyable than Dave Clark's moody Steve. 3) The Beatles played their film for comedy while the Dave Clark Five went for mood. 4) The 4 Beatles had distinctive characters while the Dave Clark Five had one leading man and 4 bland supporting actors. 5) A hard day's Night moves rapidly while "Having A Wild Weekend" drags much of the time. However, I still like "Having a Wild Weekend." Dinah was a cute little number and Steve had James Bond-like qualities. The costume party scene was a rave. The hippies being rounded up by the British army was a foreshadowing of the near future.

This movie could have been SO much better with less Dave Clark. Apparently Mr Clark was the Master of the Universe with all things DC5. He cast himself as one of the two leads in this movie and it suffers because of him. He can't act, he speaks monotonously, his demeanor is dour and completely un-interesting. The young lady in the movie is good and so are the other members of the band. Mike Smith has charisma and it shows. Rick Huxley is funny. He shows a natural talent for goofing at the right time. Unfortunately these two are not allowed to have larger parts in the film. The script is ok. It's worth watching for the mid-sixties snapshot it presents. But Dave Clark? Yeesh!

More road movie than rock movie, CATCH has a surprisingly mature, melancholy tone for a British beat picture. That it has any tone at all is a tribute to director Boorman, whose characteristic fusion of the mythic with the ordinary is already evident in this his first movie, and writer Peter Nichols, who imbues the surprisingly engaging supporting characters with a quality of personal yearning and need for escape that spans generations. Boorman's preoccupation with water, rigorous yet dreamlike use of landscape and tendency to celebrate or at least acknowledge the antiquated are just as vivid here as they are in HOPE AND GLORY. Too detailed and ambling to be anything but opaque or irrelevant on video, I suspect.