Director: John Boorman
91 minutes (12) 1965
Studio Canal Blu-ray
Rating: 8/10
Review by J.C. Hartley
I reviewed this for the DVD release in 2009, and I still think it’s a great film. As I wrote back then, I first saw it as part of a ‘pop goes to the movies’ thing, that went out on a Tuesday night on BBC1, probably in the early 1970s, when films had a six-year embargo preventing early release for television while they might still be on the theatrical circuit. My early teens were spent watching every 1960s movie that came up, a parallel education for a naive schoolboy, as that period saw cinema addressing the so-called ‘permissive society’, a period later blamed for all society’s ills by Mrs Thatcher, who denied the existence of ‘society’ in the same breath.
Just discovered that Peter Nichols, who wrote the screenplay for Catch Us If You Can (aka: Having A Wild Weekend), died in 2019, aged 92; although the Guardian obituary seems to think this film was a documentary about the band. I also discovered that Nichols wrote a TV play that I remember, The Gorge (1968), and was portrayed by the actor Francis Matthews in Charles Wood’s very funny sitcom Don’t Forget To Write! (1977-9), which stubbornly eschewed a canned-laughter track before that was the fashionable thing to do. While Nichols wrote Privates On Parade (play 1977, film 1982), his fictional alter-ego played by Matthews wrote ‘Soldiers In Spurts’.
But, Catch Us If You Can, my third viewing... First of all, it’s directed by John Boorman, so it isn’t a straightforward ‘lets-do-the-show-right-here’ musical. The Dave Clark Five play stuntmen, not musicians, and consequently the band’s music features on the soundtrack rather than as stop-me-if-you’ve-heard-this-one inserts to the narrative. The boys, whom I’ll refer to as ‘the band’ for the sake of clarity, have been hired as extras in the ‘Meat for Go’ advertising campaign, featuring winsome blonde Dinah played by Barbara Ferris; they long for the campaign to end so they can troll off to Spain for some skin-diving.
When Dinah is referred to as Dave Clark’s character Steve’s ‘girlfriend’ he angrily denies it, in fact Steve is in denial for much of the film, as Dave himself would be when fielding impertinent questions in later life about cosmetic surgery and his sexuality. After a sequence filmed at Smithfield Meat Market, Steve and Dinah ignore calls for another take, and instead take off in an E-type Jag and cruise around London, defacing ‘Meat for Go’ posters while Dinah berates passers-by through a megaphone. Searching for ‘islands’ in the city, Steve takes Dinah skin-diving in some outdoor baths, and Dinah takes Steve to the botanical gardens at Syon House to see an orange tree in the heart of the metropolis. Dinah reveals she is considering buying her own island retreat and Steve, after some pragmatic observations on the practicalities of island-life, indicates he will go with her to view it.
Leon Zissell, the mastermind behind the advertising campaign, dispatches his lackeys to bring Dinah back, but she and Steve evade them and set off on their road trip, followed by the band and pursued by Zissell’s assistants. The role of Zissell is played by David de Keyser, he of the distinctive tones recognisable from voice-overs; a particular light-bulb, or hearing-aid, moment came for me when I discovered he dubbed the role of Draco in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969). Zissell uses Dinah’s unforeseen adventure to add zest to the ad campaign, allowing the press to weave stories about ‘the butcher girl’s’ abduction by the ‘saturnine’ ‘stunt boy’ Steve.
Steve and Dinah call at a deserted ruined village on Salisbury plain where a group of somnolent travellers are hanging out. Steve is less than impressed, and reacts with disapproval when asked if the pair have any drugs. Shirley, one of the travellers, played by Sheila Fearn, Terry’s sister in the various manifestations of The Likely Lads (1964-74), and Kevin’s mum in Time Bandits (1981), is scathing about ‘weekend ravers’. Dinah is fascinated by the pointless ramblings of their leader Yeano (an almost unrecognisable Ronald Lacey). The uncomfortable sojourn is interrupted by an artillery barrage, and attack by the military, using the site as a target for war-games. The barrage destroys the E-type, and the military round up the travellers, but Steve and Dinah escape.
Hitchhiking, Steve and Dinah are picked up by middle-aged collectors Guy (Robin Bailey) and Nan (the lovely Yootha Joyce), who barely disguise a predatory interest in the pair while offering their help. Holed up in Guy and Nan’s house on The Crescent in Bath, Steve and Dinah are reunited with the band, but Kissell’s gofers are on their trail. Everyone attends a fancy-dress party at The Pump Rooms, with Kissell’s men alerting both the police and the press, but the fugitives escape again with Guy and Nan’s help, and the party ends with the inevitable dousing in the Roman baths. I’m still no wiser as to whether these scenes were filmed in the actual baths, it does look like genuine location filming; as I wrote in 2009, when I visited you weren’t even allowed to dibble your fingers in the water.
Homing in on Dinah’s island the runaways visit Louie (David Lodge) who used to run a youth club the boys attended. Louie does not remember Steve but recognises Dinah as the ‘butcher girl’. He tries to persuade the pair to help him out with publicity for the western-themed holiday park he is trying to develop, but Steve is disappointed and disillusioned. When Steve announces that he is still planning to go to Spain, Dinah is confused, although there has been no intimacy between the pair a deeper bond is assumed. Meanwhile, in a couple of telling scenes back in London, Zissell views blown-up photographs of Dinah on a light-box, and is put on the spot by a drunken hack he is cultivating, who probes him about his feelings for the girl.
Steve and Dinah arrive at her island (the tidal Burgh Island off the Devon coast). They travel over on the giant tractor and visit the run-down and deserted hotel that Dinah describes as smelling of ‘old holidays’. Zissell is already there, and Dinah’s dreams seem to have fizzled out, perhaps Steve’s lack of commitment and disillusionment is catching. Asked how he got there, Zissell points out that with the tide out the island is easily accessible across the beach, now already teeming with reporters, ‘not even a real island’ observes Dinah. The party leave the hotel and Dinah tells the press that she was never abducted, Zissell reveals to her that the next stage of the campaign is ‘gracious living’, perhaps an intimation of a relationship with him after the ‘go’ of her time with Steve. In a first show of intimacy Dinah embraces Steve with a kiss, but it is for the cameras and he walks away to rejoin his friends, casting one last look at the media circus dominating the beach.
Hard to believe now, but the Dave Clark Five were considered the Beatles’ main rivals, certainly in their penetration of the American market. Dave Clark, no musician, proved to have a shrewd business-head and retained control of the band’s output, but it has been argued that his management of the back-catalogue proved flawed, and while other 1960s bands maintained a profile through the availability of their songs the DC5 didn’t. Clark did alright however, and scored a hit with the much-derided, but bafflingly popular, West-End hit Time (1986-88) staring fellow 1960s idol Cliff Richard and Sir Lawrence Olivier’s holographic head. Clark wrote and produced an overlong 2014 documentary about his band The Dave Clark Five and Beyond: Glad All Over, which would have had you believe the DC5’s name should be uttered in the same breath as the Beatles, the Stones, the Kinks, and The Who. Various rock ‘n’ roll luminaries were wheeled-out to (read?) sing the band’s praises. I have to declare an interest here, I grew up in the 1960s and my memory of the DC5 is ‘Boom-Boom-Boom, Glad All Over’ and ‘Boom-Boom-Boom, Bits And Pieces’, I didn’t realise at the time how popular they were in the States but they certainly never pushed the creative envelope like their afore-mentioned contemporaries.
And yet what about this film, which is a film, with a thoughtful narrative rather than just being a juke-box musical? It is variously argued that, in common with his reputation for creative control, Dave Clark championed director Boorman and scripter Nichols. The ever-excellent Matthew Sweet, in annoying glasses and an interview in the disc’s extras package, certainly argues for this view. Nichols, in his short interview, is somewhat more sardonic. Nichols describes visiting Clark in his big house, where someone was thatching a bar (at least I think it was a bar, I imagined a Caribbean beach-style affair; maybe it was a barn?).
Clark had a big dog that he wanted in the movie, and expressed a liking for ‘way-out photography’ of the kind he’d seen in the trailer for the Jack Clayton and Harold Pinter film The Pumpkin Eater (1964), but he hadn’t seen the film. Nichols opines that the situation was ‘ludicrous’, but notes that he had asked Boorman what they would get out of it, and Boorman said that he would get to Hollywood, and that Nichols would be able to write his hit play.
Sure enough, Boorman went to Hollywood and directed Point Blank (1967), and Nichols wrote A Day In The Death Of Joe Egg (1967) so, as the writer concludes, they have a lot to thank Dave Clark for. The other interview in the extras is with the charmingly camp and occasionally discursive set decorator Ian Whittaker, who switched careers with this film, having started out as an actor but went on to have an impressive tally of films on his creative CV.
Watching Catch Us If You Can again, I still think it’s a great film with a lot going on. Sweet makes some grand claims for its study of celebrity, the media, and capitalism, as well as it being a film appearing at the very moment the 1960s began to ‘swing’, but already anticipating the disillusionment that would be charted in later movies - actually disillusionment seemed to set in pretty quickly, but for the sake of argument think of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970). What I’ve chosen to take away from this particular viewing is what a thorough-going pain-in-the-arse Steve’s character is. Priggish and petulant throughout, he rains on every parade. Whereas Dinah at least tries to engage with the disparate individuals the pair come into contact with, be they hippy travellers, middle-aged would-be lotharios like Guy, or Louie and his rubbish Dude Ranch, Steve finds everything tedious and disappointing and an annoying distraction from his dream of skin-diving in Spain with his mates.
During her seductive pitch, Yootha Joyce’s Nan offers Steve a glass of sherry, which he declines: ‘Tried it once, didn’t fancy it’. She offers him a cigarette, which he also turns down, this time Nan butts in: ‘Tried it once, didn’t fancy it’. Of course, the subtext is, they are talking about sex, Steve’s character is totally asexual. Despite his little-puppy look at Dinah as he and the boys roar off across the Devon beach at the end of the film, the notion that the pair would have ever got together seems as ludicrous as the pitch for the film seemed to Nichols when he was hired. Sweet suggests that Boorman wasn’t happy with Clark’s performance, and I’ve read somewhere that Clark wasn’t happy either, but the performances by the leads suggest that the central relationship itself, and relationships in general, have become infantilised. Bunking-off in E-type Jags and Mini-Mokes, playing soldiers, and cowboys and indians, dressing up in costumes and jumping in the water, and finally the holiday is over, and it’s the last day on the beach.
