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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.

I've got to admit that I resisted John Boorman's first film, an effort to replicate the success of The Beatles' A Hard Days Night by fellow British Invasion band the Dave Clark Five. It was hard to figure out what was even going on with five, young British men that all kind of looked alike and, separated by almost sixty years from their celebrity, difficult to differentiate. However, the movie does gain a focus as it goes, and it's a surprisingly intelligent and sad one at that. I wonder if part of the issue is a reported creative tug of war between Boorman and his main star Dave Clark who was trying to use the film as something of a star vehicle for himself.

Steve (Clark) is the lead of five stuntmen working on a series of ads for meat also starring Dinah (Barbara Ferris), an ad campaign developed by Leon (David de Keyser) back at the office while Steve, Dinah, and the other four members of the band, I mean, stunt team, work on a commercial at a meat packing plant. Steve gets too sick of it all and, in between shots with Dinah along with him in the great looking Jaguar from the production, decides to just abscond. If what follows wasn't inspired by Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, I'll eat my shoe, for what follows is a largely aimless series of events as Steven and Dinah escape their jobs, London, and their lives.

However, I'll get some crap for this, I think Boorman does Breathless better than Godard did. I'm not going to go in to why I've never, ever been able to get into Breathless, but I do end up getting into Boorman's take much more than Godard's.

The journey that Steve and Dinah takes is a journey into something like dreams. Not the dreams of the night but the dreams of the day. They are both out to discover the literal location of Burgh Island, a vacation spot in the middle of winter. To get there, they keep to the side roads and encounter Beatniks in an abandoned south English town and getting a ride from a married couple Guy (Robin Bailey) and Nan (Yootha Joyce). It was at the couple's house where I discovered my first sense of the warring creative senses, and it all has to do with a scene between Dinah and Guy. It's obvious that both Guy and Nan are trying to have sex with their visitors, while the couple teases the other at their lack of success as they also feign jealousy of each other's attempts, Guy brings Dinah up to his collection of old movie stuff, what he calls the pop history of the world, and the two speak of the effervescent nature of memory and life. This is also around the point where Leon, at his office in London, looks at a series of projected images of Dinah in a framing that recalls Bergman's Persona, though this came out a year prior to Bergman's film (did Boorman inspire Bergman?!). There's something really intelligent going on under the surface here, and it just comes more to the surface as the film goes on.

The rest of the Dave Clark Five join them for a costume party. At the party, with the ad agency's men on their tail in order to capture the end of Dinah's run for promotion purposes, the movie becomes more in line with a knockoff of A Hard Day's Night with everyone dressing as movie characters (including a couple of Marx Brothers) while antics go on as the five and Dinah escape. Steve and Dinah break off and go straight to Burgh Island, and the finale is a weirdly dreamy, ironic, and even somewhat touching ending to this strange little weekend. It's there that they discover, on this abandoned vacation spot that will only reopen after winter, that they've been allowed to run around in order to help promote the meat campaign, creating a feeling of artificiality about the journey, matched visually by this island which, when the tide is low, actually connects to the land by a sandbar. It's not an island, and they were never really quite free. How much of what they felt as they discovered beatniks, ran from the British military (it's a strange little episode), fled from paparazzi, and generally just ran around the southern countryside of England was actually real?

For a film that was obviously marketed as just another zany little adventure for some British invasion pop band that seems to have been completely forgotten by the culture in the decades since, that's a surprisingly sedate and pensive note to end things on.

As the film progressed, I saw these flashes of cinematic influence and a take on freedom in a controlled culture (specifically show business, but it could extend out from there generally) that actually showed the film had a fair bit on its mind beyond silly antics. The silly antic stuff is fine, but it feels a bit lazy and not all that well thought out, like Boorman and Clark just set up the cameras and waited for magic to happen. The lack of clarity around the opening as well is something of a frustration, but once this film settles down, it becomes quite compelling. I would assume that Boorman had more responsibility for the scenes that captured my attention more because Clark is generally not in them save the ending, so this feels like a really interesting place for the nascent feature film director, fresh from a starting point in British television, to start.

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!

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).

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.