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.

Back in the late 1960's, Birmingham's canal network was in sad decline - with more miles of canals than Venice, this undemanding story with tracks sung by Cliff had a reasonable story-line, but the REAL star is the City of Birmingham itself.

Since the film was made, the canal network has been given the respect it deserved and is now a working waterway, with new developments at Gas Street Basin (behind the 'Brumburger' shop) a testament to the regeneration. Since the 70's, Birmingham is probably unrecognisable, with many of the modern buildings shown already replaced.

The cast worked well, but it was often painful watching the Fox hunting scenes (now a banned activity) and seemingly added only to add some 'english quaintness' for non-native viewers.

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.

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.

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.