Take Me High

This is not the best known of Cliff Richard's films, but personally I like it very much. Cliff plays an ambitious young businessman helping a girl who lives on a narrow-boat to start her own restaurant. Deborah Watling is charming as the young chef, and George Cole and Hugh Griffith provide strong comic support, with Anthony Andrews suitably suave as Cliff's rival. The songs are good, especially the title song Take Me High. The most striking thing about the film though is the Birmingham location, i don't think there are many films set in Birmingham, and I imagine very few musicals, possibly this film is unique in that respect. Birmingham is not the most picturesque of cities, but this film shows it in quite an attractive light, especially the canal scenes. Altogether this is a charming film.

This is the sort of film to watch in a crowd with a cruel sense of humour. Can you imagine a travelogue of Birmingham? With musical numbers? You don't have to, because TMH does it for you. The song that stays with me to this day is 'Brumburger!'. Really, if Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder hadn't got 'Springtime For Hitler', 'Take Me High' would have done the trick. Beyond kitsch, beyond parody, beyond belief.

Glad Amazon doesn't require enormous review length any more, since this review doesn't need it. Awful British movie industry fodder at its worst. The sound for everything outdoors is looped and audience for this, even in 1973, would be whom? No one I knew. Richard successfully bucked this stuff about 3 years later with his "I'm Nearly Famous" album when he realized his career was tanking. The Brumberger song takes the biscuit.

Essentially an extended music video clip for Cliff Richards.

Richards is a merchant banker who is moved to Birmingham and what follows is a montage of the brutalist concrete architecture that made Birmingham worse, and shots of flyovers before they were covered in tags and vomit.

George Cole is there and there's a famous scene of shooting the television set. Later there is a 1980s direct-to-video film style plot line where Richards and his girlfriend plan to open a burger bar selling "Brumburgers".

There's quite a lot of embarrassed people in the street scene, as if having to live in Birmingham wasn't punishment enough ! Product placement - BOAC airlines.

By any measure this is a very cheesy film, but it's so harmless and wholesome you can't really take umbrage with it. Based around the jewel of the British Waterways, the Gas Street basin it offers a fascinating historical insight into this very special area of Birmingham. Sort of film you can enjoy as long as you restrict watching it to, say, every ten years or so.

It's a pity that it has yet to be released on a modern format as I know many Brummies would enjoy just watching the film for the shots around the City. A City which has changed much, Take me High provides a good visual snap shot of the capitol of the British Midlands just before it's decline as a light industrial engineering world centre.

During Cliffs tenure on his canal boat in the Gas Street basin he would have had a neighbour in the fictional Wilf Harvey popular elderly Crossroads character who lived on dry land adjacent to the canals.