Espresso bongo

This is kind of an annoying low-budget film, but at least I, an American, got to see what the fuss used to be about the UK singer Cliff Richard, whom I had never seen before. I also have never seen Lawrence Harvey in a semi-comedic role. He seemed as if he were on speed, or coke; very annoying. I kept yelling, "Give the guy a Valium!" And his accent drifted from plummy English to South African to European Yiddish, and back again. Most disconcerting.

But watch the film for future celebs! There's Hermione Baddley (who was on "Maude"), playing a street-walking prostitute (!), there's Burt Kouwk (who played Cato in all those Pink Panther movies), playing a dissolute Soho youth, and Susan Hampshire ("Upstairs, Downstairs," and various TV movies).

The film's depiction of Soho reminded me of old American films' depictions of 42nd St. in N.Y. Really cheesy.

And apparently there wasn't too much censorship of British films then, because we see in this film lots of true female nudity (the strippers in the film). Man, I haven't seen breasts like those in ages! (All natural, all non-augmented.) See this as an interesting historical time capsule.

Watching any film 50 years after you last saw it is, at any time, a mildly unnerving experience. A film that boasts the dubious title 'Expresso Bongo' and features a not-greatly post-pubescent Cliff Richard should have provided a strong warning that turning back the clock is not always a good idea but, actually, this was a great pleasure. Based on a successful stage musical and set in the heart of the Soho music industry of the late 1950s as it comes to terms with rock and roll , 'Expresso Bongo' retains a salty edge even now. Laurence Harvey plays a chancer who happens to come across a young rocker (Cliff Richard) who he seeks to exploit shamelessly but who then proves more than a match for him. With a sharp, pungent and funny script (by 50s star writer Wolf Mankowitz) and plenty of night location shooting in Soho, the film fizzes along for the most part, resembling 'Sweet Smell of Success', but with songs and a slightly softer edge. The version on this DVD has been shorn of its extrinsic musical numbers (including one sung by old-style musical promoter Maier Tzelniker that I remember well, starting 'When I compare these little bleeders to the chorus from Aida….nausea!') but still has time for the wonderfully cynical 'Shrine on the Second Floor', as Cliff is propelled into religiosity to further his career. Harvey's weaselly good looks are just right and Sylvia Sims is very sexy as his long-suffering stripper girlfriend. Even Cliff acquits himself well, with just the right amount of ambivalence as to his complicity (including being asked, not for the last time, why he has no girlfriend). In a film where everyone is either on the make or being exploited, sometimes at the same time, there is at least one poignant real-life parallel. The distinguished stage actress Hermione Baddelley here plays a veteran street tart. She has a couple of affectionate scenes with Harvey, with whom, despite their age difference, she had a relationship in the early 1950s just as his career was getting under way. Now, Harvey was on a roll and would shortly go to Hollywood on the strength of his next film, 'Man at the Top'.

It's really about a hustler-turned-agent (Laurence Harvey) and how opportunity comes (and passes him by) via his finding (and losing) the kid-with-talent (Cliff Richard). A scene I liked was where the agent and the label exec (Meier Tzelniker) shamelessly discuss their plans for Bongo Herbert's future - i.e., what can he do for them, never mind what he can do for himself.

This might have been a much more memorable movie with a bit more backing and some rewrites. It starts (and ends) by taking us to the cruddier side of London ca. 1960 - strippers, noisy streets, the grime, the neon-lights - all of it filled with the never-was's and the never-will-be's hoping against hope for That One Break. No U.S. movie at the time would ever have thought of this, whereas this U.K. movie did so without any Hollywood-esque qualms about "how will it play in Peoria?"

Strange to think: when this movie, about a young rocker getting started, was released there was a band of Liverpool kids who got a gig in a dive on the Hamburg Reeperbahn ...

One last bit: check out an uncredited kid named Susan Hampshire. She has four lines but she ante-dates Monty Python's "Upper-Class-Twit-of-the-Year" sketch by 10 years - she does it to a t.

I wasn't sure what to expect from this film, not having seen it back in the day, or since. In some ways it is perhaps better than I had hoped and in another less so. The problem, for me, seems to lie in the stage musical origins. Never having been a fan of such fare, it is those elements, the all singing, all dancing with lush orchestration that I don't enjoy. The more 'street' sections with the lads getting established, the strip club and marvellous Soho location shooting is fine by me but I don't need fat impresarios singing and 'dancing' especially the incredible, 'Nausea' supposedly about the very youngsters he is promoting. Cliff is fine, strangely enough his wavering and erratic singing voice seeming his biggest problem. He must have sorted that out later by sticking to what he was able to deal with. So, I loved the London streets, the decent enough representation of Soho back in the late 50s, the slightly cheeky strip scenes and although the film is not very even, still harping back to its stage roots, it is very watchable.

I saw Expresso Bongo on cable TV back in 1979 and thought it was marvelous. So I was thrilled when I learned that it would finally released on VHS, though only in the UK, in the mid-1990s. My favorite scene, of course, was the comical highlight. Laurence Harvey is in the record producer's office, he drops the needle on a disc, the gramophone starts playing music, and the two of them strike up a song called 'Nausea'. They get so carried away that they take the song with them out onto the street, where they dance down the sidewalk. Now that I could at last own my own copy and luxuriate in lovely memories, I ordered a copy right away (I had PAL equipment even back then), it arrived by overseas air mail, and I was mortified to see that the 'Nausea' song was entirely missing. I was astonished at how bad the movie was without that sequence.

Since the video derived claimed copyright by the Rohauer Collection, I called Tim Lanza of Rohauer (it was one of two times I ever contacted him) to ask what had happened. He was surprised by the news. He had not seen the VHS, but he assured me that he was familiar with the film and that the song was certainly included in his 35mm prints. He told me that Kino had also licensed VHS rights, and he wondered if they would include or delete the song. He surmised that perhaps there was a rights tie-up issue with 'Nausea' that prevented its use on video, but he really didn't know.

So I wrote to Wolf Mankowitz (yes, I knew him personally, and his wife Ann) and asked if he could intervene. He wrote back saying that the film's producer, Val Guest, had in his old age acquired the only vice he had not known in his youth: stupidity. He had sold all rights to the film for a pittance and now neither Val nor Wolf had any control over it whatsoever.

At the Syracuse Cinecon shortly afterwards, I asked Jessica Rosner if the Kino edition of Expresso Bongo was complete. Of course it was, she said, as if by reflex. But then she stopped for a moment, and remembered that Kino had received a letter from an irate customer complaining about a missing scene, but that nobody at Kino took that letter seriously, because there was no hint of any deletion in the 35mm print they had used, and the running time exactly matched the running time as originally announced in 1959. My heart sank. I told her about the British VHS, and she said, yes, Kino had used precisely the same 35mm source that the British VHS had derived from. I told her and others at Kino that Tim Lanza of the Rohauer Collection had that scene and that they should go to him for any reissues. Other Kino staff by then had become fed up with me, saying that sales had been poor and that any further restoration would not be financially viable. End of story.

A few years later, in 2002 I think, I met with some movie-buffs at a restaurant in Manhattan. One fellow at the table, whose name I can no longer recall, was an employee of Kino's new DVD division. I asked him if the recent Expresso Bongo DVD was finally complete. He smiled from ear to ear and said that he and others had crawled through all the archives in England but could not find a print with the 'Nausea' song, and so, no, sadly, the DVD was the same as the VHS. I shouted back: 'TIM LANZA HAS IT!!!! WHY DIDN'T YOU ASK TIM LANZA? HE'S THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER!' My outburst made no impression.

According to rayshaw44 who posted a query to the IMDb bulletin board, there are two other songs missing as well: 'I Never Had It So Good' and 'Nothing Is for Nothing'. He could well be right!

Face it. Now with two VHS editions and a DVD edition that are all butchered, Expresso Bongo has a new 'definitive' version, and chances that more than a handful of people will ever see the complete edition are vanishingly small. Unless, of course, we want to pool our resources, license the film, and issue our own DVD when the other video licenses expire. Anyone interested? rjbuffalo@rjbuffalo.com