What a Crazy World

From the plot you would expect a potboiler of a film but its stars bring it to life. Harry H. Corbett (AKA Harold Steptoe) and Joe Brown are such likeable characters that you can't help enjoying the movie. Add a live performance from Freddie and the Dreamers and it just can't lose.

I watched this black and white film thinking it must have been made in 1959 - 1960 and was somewhat surprised to find it was 1963!

It was Rock Around The Clock that really ignited the craze for rock n roll musically.Most of them made very cheaply and quickly forgettable.This is built round the comment Joe Brown.No actor with an engaging personality.This features both pop stars and experienced actors.The mix works rather well.The music is catchy if unmentionable.There is a lot of location work in sixties London.Also featured are popular entertainments of the sixties.Bingo and ten pin bowling being uses of old cinemas.We also see an extract from The Mummy,a Hammer success of the era.This is no classic but it is an interesting picture of an era now over half a century ago.

I hate to admit this but my mother took me to see this as the cinema back in the day because I liked Freddie and the Dreamers (Well I was only 11 at the time, that's my excuse anyway). I still have the EP of all his songs in the film.

I saw it again just recently on Talking Pictures and loved it just as much as I did then. Marty Wilde and Joe Brown whilst not Oscar winning actors put in above average performances for pop stars, Joe is in fact a seriously good musician who could out play Eric Clapton before there was an Eric Clapton. Then there is the sexy Susan Maughan, she of Bobby's Girl fame, doesn't matter she can't act just watching her is enough. Then there is the many faces of Michael Ripper seen playing a multitude of parts. Harry H. (Harold Steptoe) Corbett playing much the same character and Bill (Snudge) Fraser. All my childhood stars in one film.

What's not to like? well not much really, OK it's a bit dated but then so are a lot of films of that period, this one was originally a stage musical. Some of the songs are a bit cringe-worthy i.e 'My First Romance' but then we have the title song, Oh What a Family, and 'Layabouts Lament' sung in probably the most UN-PC scene ever. All written by Alan Klein (Not the Beatles manager) who plays one of Mary Wilde's gang.

Fab to see London of the sixties, especially the wonderful Denmark Street, soon to be demolished for a yuppie paradise with no traffic or yellow lines.

Seeing again brought the sixties back to me, those were the days. I saved it on my hard disc and will watch it again.

OK, it was great to see a very young Joe Brown, Marty Wilde and sexy Susan Maughan but other than that it was SO dated. It is of my period but there is no way I would have paid to go and see this when it was released.

I'm sorry, but pop films of this era British or American just look like something the local school threw together with and 8mm cine camera.

The only thing I like to watch this type of film for is to see the cars of this period when I bought my first one.

In 1961 Michael Carreras took a sabbatical for a couple of years from, literally, his parent company Hammer Films to try his hand at something different. That he certainly did with this breezy little pop musical preserving early sixties London in CinemaScope with current pop idols Joe Brown and Marty Wilde (with Harry H. Corbett ironically playing the heroine's father, since he was on the verge of a lifetime of typecasting as the son in 'Steptoe and Son').

As a friendly nod towards his films for Hammer, Carreras brought along with him dear old Michael Ripper, whose ubiquity in Carreras's productions for Hammer inspired his presence in nine small parts throughout this film as 'The Common Man' (including as a member of the audience watching - what else? - 'The Curse of Frankenstein').