Hahn im Korb

There's the Rank gong. and they even mention Arthur Rank in the first few minutes! in spherical Eastman color. Stars Jack Buchanan as John Bentley. and this was one of the last things he did... because he died just a couple years after making this. In the story, Jerry Wayne is Bobby Denver, the crying crooner. although on imdb, he was only in eleven films, and doesn't even have a photo. but it's Diana Dors month on TCM, so she's in here as Pearl. the running gag here is that the daughters are all wiring daddy for money, when their own no-good husbands run into trouble. so singer Denver and the daughters all converge at the family home, and Buchanan's acting is over the top, which is probably just what the director was going for. a fast talking, fast moving, caper, almost cartoon-ish pace. and, of course, it's from a show, so the talking and singing just go on and on. and on. Let's do the hokey pokey polka! This one is energetic and fun. Long as #$$$ though. should have been so much shorter. Diana Dors appears at the cast party about halfway through. Directed by oscar-nominated Lee Thompson. looks like his biggest films were Navaronne and Cape Fear.

I noticed one reviewer compared this movie to the later American film "Bye, Bye Birdie"...and that is a pretty astute observation. Both films have a lot of similarities, though "Birdie" is much more of a musical, though there's plenty of singing and teenage hi-jinx in both.

When the film begins, the American crooner Bobby Denver (not to be confused with the "Gilligan's Island" actor) arrives in Britain...and the women there are losing their minds for him! Shortly after his arrival and the mobs of women attack him, he is tricked into going to Wimbledon (just outside London) to stay with the Bentley family. As for the Bentley's, the father is the world's biggest square, his wife is sadly neglected and their three daughters are screwy! Now, you add Denver to the household and chaos naturally ensues. But something else happens...and that you'll need to see for yourself.

According to imdb, Bobby Denver is a character inspired by American singer Johnnie Ray. While he's pretty much forgotten today (partly because he went deaf while still quite young), apparently when he visited the UK and Australia, it was like Beatle-mania and Elvis--with screaming women following him everywhere!

So is it any good? Well, yes...but I should point out that the film is NOT subtle in any way! In other words, the humor is pretty broad and low-brow. As for me, I didn't mind this and a few of the jokes were cute--such as Denver's propensity to cry and make people cry as well as how the women of the Bentley household got over their infatuation with Bobby. I also enjoyed seeing Diana Dors in the movie. There really was no reason for her to be in the film, but she was nice to look at here. But remember....the film is certainly not subtle in the least and may annoy you with its characters who seem, much of the time, like caricatures. I can see why some reviewers hated it...but I didn't mind the silliness.

Really, almost a warmup to the Strouse-Adams stage musical of five years later, in that it's about a teen-idol singer (a crooner here, rock and roll being just on the horizon) who invades an upper-middle-class suburban home, antagonizes the paterfamilias, enthralls his impressionable teenage daughter, and generally charms the women of the neighborhood. As the dad, Jack Buchanan mainly purses his lips and inserts nasal insults into the proceedings; he's nowhere near as broad as Paul Lynde, nor as funny. (But then, his lines are unusually feeble.) And he only gets one brief dance, near the end, and a smattering of vocals. David Hurst, as a cartoonish German shrink studying the effects of a teen heartthrob on the bourgeoisie, is just unforgivably bad. It's not all his fault: J. Lee Thompson, as he did years later with "What a Way to Go!", overemphasizes everything and hammers the comedy into the ground. Jerry Wayne, as the Conrad Birdie of the piece, sings some Johnnie Ray-type ballads with the right sobbing style. And Jeannie Carson, as another of Buchanan's girls, is the best thing in the picture, pretty and spirited and talented, even in an overproduced musical sequence that hasn't much to do with anything. There's also Diana Dors, the camera lingering lovingly on her cleavage, as a good-time party girl. None of it makes sense, the subplots are unrelated to each other, and there's no payoff, but as a chronicle of how the British tried to adopt American pop-culture customs even as they were satirizing them, it's kind of fascinating.

With this film, the British have forfeited the right to EVER criticize American culture. Where to begin,Where to begin...the plot is indecipherable. One suspects that the script was dropped before binding and a windstorm scattered the unnumbered pages. The result is a surreal series of vignettes that float detachedly with no connection to each other.

The Johnny Ray send-ups are amusing, particularly Buchanan's version of "Cry". Having seen several Buchanan early films, including a takeoff of Twain's "Connecticut Yankee...", I know that he was capable of much better, but the film is/was impossible.

Another aspect deserving of mention is the set design. Could English homes and interiors have really been so ugly and banal? The wallpaper! The furnishings! Oh, the humanity! There is the payoff of "Miss Marple" (Hickson) as a barmaid, and Diana Dors breasts deserve an Oscar for best supporting something or other.Sometimes a film can be so bad that one must watch it to the end, as one would slow down for a car crash. If there's an award for FilmKitsch, we have a winner.

A far cry from the films that its director would make in the years immediately after this entry, it is however still okay stuff to watch, with some really amusing scenes in the mix. There are some sweeping bits of photography too, the type typical of J. Lee Thompson's later films, but generally the technical side here is ordinary, and the musical numbers come off as rather flat. The story is overly silly, with little in the way of humour and charm, and the plot does not stretch very well to the one and a half hour length. It is really not too irritating to view though - it is just quite ordinary of its type - and fans of Carry On may be interested to give it a go, with supporting roles for Charles Hawtrey, Joan Sims and Hattie Jacques. Hawtrey's "I dig him!" is particularly amusing to watch.