Spend The Night With: The B List Of Brit Pop Movies

What A Whopper! (1961. Dir. Gilbert Gunn) / Catch Us If You Can (1965. Dir. John Boorman) / Slade In Flame (1975. Richard Loncraine)

Richard Lester’s revolutionary, head spinning, mock-u-mentary “A Hard Day’s Night”, took a ‘typical’ day in the life of The Beatles and created the blue print for everything that was swinging, fab and gear about the 1960s.
At the time the mop-tops were teetering on the precipice of global fame. Lester’s manic jump cuts, hand held cameras and surreal vision (he’d worked his TV apprenticship behind the camera for Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan and it shows) matched to Alun Owen’s script (part Marx Brothers, part straight transcripts of the Beatles’ private conversations) and a simply brilliant collection of songs, saw the fabs metamorphosise into pop Gods and the film industry fell over itself to copy the look, feel and sound of the film.
A Hard Day’s Night was year zero in terms of pop exploitation pics. So much so that it’s hard to imagine anything that came before. But the pop-cash in genre was already long established. The trend for pop stars led movies was proving to be a cash cow for the mainstream UK movie industry by the early 1960s. Inspired by the US success of Elvis at the movies Cliff Richard had already proved his box office worth with The Young Ones and the likes of Joe Brown and Tommy Steele were swiftly being steered towards light entertainment, away from their rock and roll roots of the decade before.
It was natural, then, that Adam Faith, another handsome performer whose pop chart credibility was receding as fast as his hairline by 1961, would make the shift. Faith, though, had an edge. His personality was a complex mix of smouldering vulnerability and craven ambition that would see him through being a 50’s teenybopper idol, jobbing 60’s actor, a bone fide TV star in the 1970s with the smash hit series Budgie, a failed business entrepreneur, a TV chat show pundit and a sitcom star once again in the 1990s. He certainly enjoyed life to the full, whatever the circumstances, wether he could actually act, though, is a different matter.
Certainly you’ll find little evidence of any thespian talent in What A Whopper! (a title that conjures up everything that was bad and simultaneously great about British mainstream cinema in the late 50s early 60s) but as a springboard for later TV and stage success it didn’t do Faith any harm, his enthusiasm filling in any gaps left by his stage craft.
In the film Faith plays a novelist who fakes photos of the Loch Ness Monster and tries to convince the locals they’re the real thing in order to plug his new book.
Sadly it’s as trite and wooden as the fake monster at the centre of the plot.
What A Whopper! was the beginning of the end of the pop film the whole family could enjoy, though. A Hard Day’s Night put the killer boot in, but the genre it spawned would also find it difficult to keep up the quality.
Catch Us If You Can, starring Beatles rivals for the pop crown (although they came nowhere near)The Dave Clark Five, for instance wore the influence of A Hard Day’s Night as cufflinks on it’s sleeves.
Directed by former advertising man John Boorman (who would go on to direct the terrific Hope & Glory) it was packed to the gills with innovative jump cutting and scenes of England at it’s sixties swinging best with a fine performance from the sadly underrated British comic actress Yootha Joyce.
The trouble is it takes itself too seriously by attempting to give depth to what is an all surface exercise in escapism.
Band leader Dave Clark smoulders self consciously throughout, and the soundtrack proves that while they had their moments the Five were no fab four.
The over all result is an advert stretched to 91 mins. By the mid 1970s the pop exploitation theme was been turned on itself.
The excellent ‘That’ll Be The Day’ and its follow-up ‘Stardust’, featured a pop star turned actor (David Essex) ala What A Whopper!, Summer Holiday etc. but took the often murky world of the pop industry as it’s inspiration and stood back as we watched a talented individual eaten up by ruthless managers, opportunist mates and hard drugs.
Slade, one of the biggest British bands of that decade, opted for a similar story line when they were declared popular enough for the box office.
Here Noddy (who would prove later to be a strong character actor on TV) Dave (the gawping idiot in the spangly get-up) and the other two play the band Flame who against a back drop of grim terraces and smoke billowing factory chimneys find pop stardom but not without selling their souls to the marketing machine.
Unlike A Hard Days Night, which made being paid to make music, race around parties and sleep with beautiful women look quite a lark, Slade In Flame, pictured the pop process as a sausage factory, an industry that exploited it’s employees like any other.
Slade In Flame made pop look like work, which is why nobody went to see it.