Expresso Bongo

It's been said that Cliff Richard was the UK's equivalent of Elvis Presley. Personally I saw a lot more Ricky Nelson or Frankie Avalon in his musical style. Nevertheless he was and does remain a very big singing star in the British Commonwealth countries though he never was able to make it the USA market as the Beatles who symbolize the next generation of pop stars.

He plays what he is a young musical hopeful who gets discovered by Laurence Harvey, a fast talking British cockney version of Sammy Glick. Harvey gives a nice performance here though he's almost as 'on' all the time as Phil Silvers.

Sylvia Sims is Harvey's patient girl friend who works as a stripper in a Soho club and Yolande Donlon who was an American expatriate in London plays an American musical comedy star who takes a far more than motherly interest in young Richard. Donlon manages to best Harvey, but the man does come out of the battle none the worst for wear.

Expresso Bongo is a realistic look at the British music industry at the beginning of the sixties. Richard sings a couple of songs and does them well in the manner of Ricky Nelson.

Best scene in the film when Harvey gets on a panel discussion show with a minister and psychologist about today's youth and their musical taste. Those two and the moderator were certainly not expecting the shtick Harvey gave them. Worth seeing for that alone.

Harvey's performance is akin to Cary Grant in His girl Friday which I term "Cary Grant unleashed" Like Grant, Harvey takes his character and far from overacting rather sets the screen on fire. As for the movie itself,it lags when Harvey is not on the screen and it needs another actress in the Dixie roll who can somehow match Harvey. Dixie drags down the last third of the film. For the legions who deem Harvey's career as a series of zombie-like performances, Bongo turns that opinion on it's ear. Cliff Richard does a good job in his first screen roll. Beware of the current DVD release. It does not have several musical numbers and this greatly mars the movie.

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

Featuring a veritable 'who's-who' of great actors Laurence Harvey, Eric Pohlman, Susan Hampshire, Sylvia Syms, Martin Miller (in a bunch of throwaway scenes), and many others), this film captures the 'changing of the guard', as it were, as the youth music - the then-burgeoning rock and roll was just being born in the UK. The dialogue - esp. Mr Harvey's - is rat-a-tat fast, like another commenter (rayshaw44) of this film noted, is akin to His Girl Friday's. As for another commenter (LHL12), I have a beautiful print of the filn, and it contains the 'Nausea' sequence, as well as the others mentioned. I'm writing this almost a decade after they wrote their comment (actually a long interesting story of this films butchering), and therefore I don't know if they're aware that a complete version of 'Bongo' isn't that hard to find (though I DO totally understand and commiserate, being a completest myself, I'm a stickler for the 'correct', unadulterated versions of things). To say this is a film by a great master, like a Fellini or a Kubrick, it isn't. But there was a wonderful period in postwar England that the film business percolated (a pun), and many wonderful small films of all varieties were made. This is one of them. It makes me (as one who wasn't yet born) both fond of, as well as a bit misty-eyed, as the homogenous days we are now in leave no room for an individual's voice. I highly recommend Espresso Bongo.