Saturday Night Out

There is no mistaking which decade this film was made in.It is clearly London and the swinging sixties.Mind you it is difficult to believe that this was 50 years ago and got an X certificate.Nowdays more like PG.The film has a very catchy title number which has stayed with me all the years since I first saw the film.The film is one of the portmanteau type,covering the adventures of 5 merchant seamen on leave.Some stories better than others.Bernard Lee in a rather different part,played partly for comic effect is quite good.The sailor going to the clip joint is quite interesting as it features one of the last performances of former boxer \Freddie \mills before he died in unexplained circumstances.The love story with the Australian sailor and the one with the electrician who spends the night alone in a room with a girl he has picked up and sleeps in a chair,are less satisfactory.This film captures London's Dockland in its last throes before it was transformed into offices and homes.In one instance they refer to a bomb site and this is nearly 20 years after the end of the war.

The British films of the swinging sixties are typified for their crashing through the art barriers and doing things that had never been done before. Sometimes it came off; sometimes - well, all too often, to be exact - it didn't. Compare this with the "straight films" of the 1950s. Between these two phases of British cinema, there were a "special years" transitory phase: the straightness of the past was laid side by side with the oncoming weirdness of the swinging sixties. This is such a film.

The film follows the adventures of some merchant seamen on a London night out, before they return to their ship in the morning. There are some memorable scenes in this film. These include the "boyfriend" who is in a meditative trance, the know-all sailor getting his comeuppance, when he gets ripped off in a clip joint, and Bernard Lee voluntarily writing a cheque for ten pounds after a failed blackmail attempt. All this, and The Searchers playing in a pub, too.

It is a typical British B movie of the period, and is quite watchable.

Seven sailors in London have an evening out before they have to return to ship.

It's an example of the 'Swinging London' genre of film, which means a diversity of exploits, from David Lodge, who spends the evening in with an old girl friend, to Bernard Lee, who thinks he's struck gold, to John Bonney and Coiln Campbell, who find love and frustration. There's a lot of seaminess to this movie, which turns out to be essentially normative and no worse than PG-12 by modern standards.

Liverpool band The Searchers play one number in a night club. The producers got the Beatles for the gig, but decided they didn't want to pay the train fare.

I was in the Merchant Navy at this time and much of the film rings true. I only visited a clip joint once but you never forget. This was not the part of London that swung but further East. Some scenes are embarrassing but it is entertaining.

Not to be mistaken with the famous British kitchen sink drama SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING; the next day hardly matters and there are hardly any sinks in SATURDAY NIGHT OUT...

Except maybe at Heather Sears' bizarro apartment as a flaky, blunt and childish Beatnik chick, having met one of several merchant seaman on a weekend pass, starting out at a nightclub where house band The Searchers jovially blast their dance-steady Beatlesque rock...

Providing the kind of source music (non-composed and heard by both the audience and characters) that'd become normal a decade later in the 24-hour spanning all-night classic AMERICAN GRAFFITI...

Alas this forerunner has a bland existential plot yet is loaded with fine British actors like Bernard Lee (despite being way too old for ingenue Erika Remberg), Nigel Green and David Lodge...

And while not crime-centered like many B&W British New Wave flicks, the best story involves Inigo Jackson seduced by and progressively ripped off by a darker club's b-girls Caroline Mortimer and Vera Day as he slowly catches on, providing the most situational suspense herein...

Meanwhile the only satisfying arc has Francesca Annis forever hooked with the handsomest of the traipsing males: all of whom should have had a wilder, more intriguing SATURDAY NIGHT OUT...

Overall this feels more like a Tuesday.