Catch Us If You Can | |
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![]() A poster bearing the film's U.S. title: Having a Wild Weekend | |
Directed by | John Boorman |
Written by | Peter Nichols |
Produced by | David Deutsch Basil Keys |
Starring | Dave Clark Julian Holloway Lenny Davidson Rick Huxley Mike Smith Denis Payton Barbara Ferris |
Cinematography | Manny Wynn |
Edited by | Gordon Pilkington |
Music by | The Dave Clark Five John A. Coleman Basil Kirchin |
Production company | |
Distributed by | Warner Bros. Pictures |
Release dates |
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Running time | 91 minutes |
Country | United Kingdom |
Language | English |
Catch Us If You Can (U.S. title: Having a Wild Weekend in the U.S.; also known as The Dave Clark Five Runs Wild) is the 1965 feature-film debut of director John Boorman. [1] [2] It was designed as a vehicle for pop band the Dave Clark Five, whose popularity at the time rivalled that of the Beatles, and it is named after their hit song "Catch Us If You Can". [3] [4]
The five are living together in a London flat. They make breakfast then drive to Smithfield Market, passing multiple advertising posters featuring a girl and the slogan "Meat for Go".
During the filming of a TV commercial for a "Meat for Go" campaign set in London's Smithfield Market, stuntman Steve, disillusioned by the inanity of his job, absconds in an E-type Jaguar (260 EYW, one of the props) with a young actress/model, Dinah. After a visit to Oasis Swimming Pools, an open-air swimming pool in central London, and a scene in and around the Great Conservatory on the grounds of Syon House, they make their way across a wintry southern England toward Burgh Island, off the coast of Devon. Dinah is contemplating buying the island, presumably to escape the pressures of her celebrity as the "Butcher Girl" in the TV meat advertising campaign. This act of rebellion is cynically exploited by the advertising executive behind the campaign, Leon Zissell, who dispatches two of his henchmen to pursue the fleeing couple.
On their journey, Steve and Dinah first encounter a group of beatniks squatting in MOD-owned buildings on Salisbury Plain (some of this sequence was shot in the evacuated village of Imber), and then, an eccentric, upper-class, middle-aged married couple in the opulent surroundings of the Royal Crescent in Bath, Somerset. Steve also plans to visit his boyhood hero, Louie, whose youth club in London's East End he attended, and who has since relocated to Devon.
Having fled the police and Zissell's henchmen after a fancy-dress party in the Roman Baths at Bath, Steve and Dinah (with the rest of Steve's gang and the police in pursuit) make their way toward Devon. Louie recognises Dinah instantly because of her TV celebrity, but fails to recognise Steve and misremembers his name, even after being introduced. Dinah's island also proves to be disappointing; at low tide, it is reachable from the mainland, and Zissell, who is besotted with Dinah, has already arrived.
Although they perform the off-screen soundtrack music, the Dave Clark Five (unlike the Beatles in their films) do not portray themselves but appear to be a team of freelance stuntmen/extras led by the saturnine Steve (Dave Clark). Clark had worked as a stuntman on several films, which appears to have provided him with a level of cinematic experience and camera sense rare for a pop artist of the time.[ citation needed ] The other four members of the band perform under their real first names, but have comparably minor parts.
The film is less of a conventional pop vehicle than one dealing with the frailty of personal relationships, the flimsiness of dreams and the difficulty of maintaining spontaneity, authenticity, and integrity in a stage-managed "society of the spectacle."[ opinion ] Boorman's debut film drew favourable notices from Pauline Kael and Dilys Powell,[ citation needed ] as it captured much of the cultural energy of the time.
In a running gag, Lenny Davidson is the only member of the Dave Clark Five who does not utter a single word in the film, usually because the others do not let him talk. He comes dressed as Harpo Marx to the Arts Ball party (until Dinah switches costumes with him to avoid being caught by the police and her bosses; this is evident not only in the film but also on the back cover of the soundtrack album).
Marianne Faithfull rejected the role of Dinah as being "too poppy." [5]
Denis Payton's last name is misspelled as "Paynton" in the opening and closing credits.
A still image of Yootha Joyce from the film was used as sleeve art on the singles "Ask" and "Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others" by the English rock band the Smiths. [6]
At an appearance in Paterson, New Jersey, during the Dave Clark Five's promotional tour for the film, the band's business manager and a bodyguard were arrested after assaulting a police officer; the scuffle began when police told the band's fifteen uniformed guards to stop hitting teenage fans who had been rushing the stage. At an appearance at the Branford Theater in Newark, New Jersey, more than 1,100 fans created bedlam by stamping on the floor, standing on their seats and screaming. A similar reaction occurred when the band visited a cinema in Queens, New York to promote the film, with more than 5,000 fans breaking through barricades to reach the band members, causing policemen at the scene to call for reinforcements. [7] [8]
Of the 12 tracks on the U.S. soundtrack album (Epic 24162/26162), only four are from the film: "Having a Wild Weekend", "Catch Us If You Can", "Sweet Memories" and "On the Move". [9] The remainder of the songs used in the film were from previous albums, including "Time" (from Glad All Over ), [10] "Move On" and "Ol' Sol" (from American Tour ), [11] and "When" and "I Can't Stand It" (from Coast to Coast ). [12]
The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote:
Two things make this an intriguingly unusual teenage musical: it is consistently worth looking at, and it finds intelligent expression for a genuinely youthful point of view. In fact, though distantly inspired by the familiar formula, it doesn't deserve to be described as a teenage musical at all. The musical numbers (played off screen by the Dave Clark Five) are used simply as an aural background or as a starting point for a series of distinctly imaginative visual passages: fast cutting around the poster of the meat girl; long low-angled tracking shots through London; snowscapes and seascapes and Bath's Royal Crescent artistically photographed by Manny Wynn; a Felliniesque party that ends up with the leading characters, dressed as their favourite film personalities, involved in a frantic chase along the edge of a Roman bath. ... The performances of the young people are for the most part negligible, although Barbara Ferris makes an appealing Butcher Girl. Remarkably, in view of the fact that John Boorman, who has worked for television, is only thirty-one and is making his first film, this is a director's picture from start to finish. Boorman's obvious feeling for the medium is rich in promise. [13]
New York Times reviewer Bosley Crowther praised the film as an "obvious but strangely haunting romance" and a "fresh and fetching British film" in a contemporaneous review. [14]
Writing in the Ottawa Citizen, reviewer Gordon Stoneham wrote: "Having a Wild Weekend is a rather odd vehicle to spotlight a group of teen-age idols, but, on the other hand, it shows them in a new and quite pleasant light." [15]
Burgh Island is a tidal island on the coast of South Devon in England near the small seaside village of Bigbury-on-Sea. There are several buildings on the island, the largest being the Art Deco Burgh Island Hotel. The other buildings are three private houses, and a pub, the Pilchard Inn, which dates to the 14th century. The island is strongly associated with writer Agatha Christie, who often visited and used the island and its hotel as a setting and inspiration for two famous novels: And Then There Were None (1939) and Evil Under the Sun (1941).
The British Invasion was a cultural phenomenon of the mid-1960s, when rock and pop music acts from the United Kingdom and other aspects of British culture became popular in the United States with significant influence on the rising "counterculture" on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. UK pop and rock groups such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Kinks, the Zombies, Small Faces, the Dave Clark Five, The Spencer Davis Group, Herman's Hermits, the Hollies, the Animals, Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Searchers, the Yardbirds, Them, and Manfred Mann, as well as solo singers such as Dusty Springfield, Cilla Black, Petula Clark, Tom Jones, and Donovan were at the forefront of the "invasion."
List of notable events in music that took place in the year 1966.
The Dave Clark Five, also known as the DC5, were an English rock and roll band formed in 1958 in Tottenham, London. Drummer Dave Clark served as the group's leader, producer and co-songwriter. In January 1964, they had their first UK top-ten single, "Glad All Over", which knocked the Beatles' "I Want to Hold Your Hand" off the top of the UK Singles Chart. It peaked at No. 6 in the United States in April 1964. Although this was their only UK No. 1, they topped the US chart in December 1965, with their cover of Bobby Day's "Over and Over". Their other UK top-ten hits include "Bits and Pieces", "Can't You See That She's Mine", "Catch Us If You Can", "Everybody Knows", "The Red Balloon", "Good Old Rock 'n' Roll", and a version of Chet Powers' "Get Together".
Gerry and the Pacemakers were a British beat group prominent in the 1960s Merseybeat scene. In common with the Beatles, they came from Liverpool, were managed by Brian Epstein, and were recorded by George Martin. Their early successes alongside the Beatles were instrumental in popularizing the Merseybeat sound and launching the wider British beat boom of the mid-1960s.
Jackie DeShannon is an American singer-songwriter and radio broadcaster with a string of hit song credits from the 1960s onwards, as both singer and composer. She was one of the first female singer-songwriters of the rock and roll period. She is best known as the singer of "What the World Needs Now Is Love" and "Put a Little Love in Your Heart", and as the writer of "When You Walk in the Room" and "Bette Davis Eyes", which became hits for The Searchers and Kim Carnes, respectively.
Beatlemania was the fanaticism surrounding the English rock band the Beatles from 1963 to 1966. The group's popularity grew in the United Kingdom in late 1963, propelled by the singles "Please Please Me", "From Me to You" and "She Loves You". By October, the British press adopted the term "Beatlemania" to describe the scenes of adulation that attended the band's concert performances. By 22 February 1964, the Beatles held both the number one and number two spots on the Billboard Hot 100, with "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "She Loves You", respectively. Their world tours were characterised by the same levels of hysteria and high-pitched screaming by female fans, both at concerts and during the group's travels between venues. Commentators likened the intensity of this adulation to a religious fervour and to a female masturbation fantasy. Among the displays of deity-like worship, fans would approach the band in the belief that they possessed supernatural healing powers.
James George Nicol is an English drummer and business entrepreneur. He is best known for sitting in for Ringo Starr in the Beatles for eight concerts of the Beatles' 1964 world tour during the height of Beatlemania, elevating him from relative obscurity to worldwide fame and then back again in the space of a fortnight. Nicol had hoped that his association with the Beatles would greatly enhance his career but instead found that the spotlight moved away from him once Starr returned to the group, and in 1965 his subsequent lack of commercial success culminated in bankruptcy. In 1975, after having worked with a number of different bands which included a successful relationship with the Spotnicks, and several more while living in Mexico, he left the music business to pursue a variety of entrepreneurial ventures.
Ready Steady Go! was a British rock/pop music television programme broadcast every Friday evening from 9 August 1963 until 23 December 1966. It was conceived by Elkan Allan, head of Rediffusion TV. Allan wanted a light entertainment programme different from the low-brow style of light entertainment transmitted by ATV. The programme was produced without scenery or costumes and with a minimum of choreography and make-up. Allan recruited a fellow journalist, Francis Hitching, as producer. Hitching became a major figure in light entertainment in the 1960s. Robert Fleming was the first director, followed by the documentary director Rollo Gamble, then Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Daphne Shadwell and Peter Croft.
Michael George Smith was an English singer, songwriter and music producer.
Barbara Gillian Ferris is an English actress and former fashion model.
"Catch Us If You Can" is a 1965 song from The Dave Clark Five, written by group's drummer Dave Clark and guitarist Lenny Davidson. It was the title song for the film of the same name, which was retitled Having a Wild Weekend in the United States. The single reached number five in the UK and number four in the US.
"Catch Us If You Can" is a 1965 song by The Dave Clark Five.
The Dave Clark Five were an English pop rock band which formed part of the British Invasion of beat music groups in the early-mid 1960s.
Hold On! is a 1966 American musical film directed by Arthur Lubin and starring Peter Noone, Shelley Fabares, Herbert Anderson, and Sue Ane Langdon. The film features performances by Herman's Hermits and stars the band as fictionalized versions of themselves. The soundtrack was released as an album, also called Hold On!.
This is a summary of 1965 in music in the United Kingdom.
Alexander Jacobs was a screenwriter best known for his work in the action field. His writing style for Point Blank was very influential on Walter Hill.
American Tour is the third U.S. studio album by the English rock band The Dave Clark Five. This album contains the hit song "Because" as well as "Whenever You're Around", which was not a single in the U.S. but was issued as a B-side to "I'm Thinking of You Baby" in the U.K., and was used in the film Get Yourself a College Girl. In Canada, the album was released as On Stage With The Dave Clark Five on Capitol Records.
Coast to Coast is the fourth US studio album by the English rock band the Dave Clark Five. It is notable for containing two hit singles "Any Way You Want It" and "Everybody Knows ". Other songs from this album were used in the Dave Clark Five film Having a Wild Weekend such as "I Can't Stand It" and "When". In Canada, it was released as Across Canada with the Dave Clark Five on Capitol Records.
Having a Wild Weekend is the sixth American album by the British band the Dave Clark Five. It was presented as the soundtrack to the film of the same name, released in the UK as Catch Us If You Can. The album reached the Top 20 on the Billboard and contains the worldwide hit single "Catch Us If You Can".