Catch Us If You Can

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 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 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.

At last a new film genre--'pop film noir'!.The whole film is so downbeat its untrue-Dave Clark is incredibly negative,downbeat & generally 'fed-up' throughout, thats its remarkable that it got released at all,considering its niche-i.e. 60's pop music cash-in.Dave's performance is brilliant conveying a media star rebelling against the media web,overshadowing Barbara Ferris excellent portrayal as a woman who succumbs to the media bullshit.The end scene is achingly sad as Dave & the band drive off across the beach leaving her to accept being engulfed by the media throng.Considering that the film is 40 years old it holds up very well.

I was surprised in a positive way. In judging a 60s British pop film it's only fair to look beyond the Beatles at the wider canon and it contains some proper turkeys, stiff, cliched and beyond banal. Occasionally though filmmakers at least tried to be interesting and off-the-wall and this is one of those occasions. It doesn't always work and it's a bit flat in places but it definitely has its moments. The segment with the proto-hippies (or evolving beatniks) is particularly fascinating as a snapshot of a cultural undercurrent entering the mainstream consciousness. As with all films part of its appeal is in what, even unwittingly, the film shows us of the period in which it was made. As other reviewers have noted in that respect there are some revealing shots of of some very bemused members of the public in what is presumably London, all grey and very unSwinging. So not great but well worth sitting through.