Summer Holiday
                              
Director: Peter Yates
Year:  1963
Rating: 7.0
One last nostalgic pop blast from the 1960's. I wish I had the Dave Clark 5 movie Having a Wild Weekend to watch as they were so good for a few years with songs like Glad All Over and Anyway You Want It that exploded off the turntable - but instead this is a film with Cliff Richard who isn't exactly a slouch in the music department. I doubt if that many Americans are familiar with his name anymore or really ever were. He came just before the British Invasion and was more in the style of say Fabian or Frankie Avalon - but much better. So much better in fact that he has sold over 250 million records and was Knighted. He has been hugely popular in England for decades but he never really translated to America. He started off as a rebel rocker in the late 1950's - John Lennon said of him "before Cliff and the Shadows, there had been nothing worth listening to in British music" but by the time of this film in 1963 his music had mellowed down to clean cut pop. He starred in a few films in the early 1960s - a trilogy of youth musicals with The Young Ones (1961), Summer Holiday (1963) and Swinger's Paradise (1964).



This is a wonderful charming musical - in the tradition really of musicals of the 1940's more than the 60's. I could have envisioned a young Gene Kelly in this film. It has music crammed in from top to bottom (16 songs) - a song breaks out at the drop of a cue - and there are also some splendidly staged choreographed musical numbers - Cliff Richard isn't much of a dancer but he is surrounded by actors who are. The choreography is from none other than Herbert Ross who started off as a choreographer (he also did this on The Young Ones) before he moved into directing with Goodbye, Mr. Chips and The Owl and the Pussycat. And in his directing debut there is Peter Yates of Bullitt fame. So not a bad group behind the camera who obviously went on to bigger things.



Four car mechanics from London are on their Summer holiday. They buy a double-decker London transport bus and remodeled it into a traveling dormitory. They are off to Europe when they come across a group of three English birds with car trouble in France and they talk them into joining them. Along the way they also pick up a dog and a group of mimes at various points. And also a 14 year old male runaway who turns out to be an older female popstar (Lauri Peters) who wants to get away from her overbearing mother, Various adventures occur over the trip - almost getting married to a farm girl in Yugoslavia when they thought they were asking for bread but in fact it was a bride, arrested by the French police and then the Greek police. And parts of it are amusing and silly but it is the music and Richard who carries the film. At one point they visit a club in Paris and the house band are the Shadows who were Richard's band for years and who in their own right were very successful with their instrumental records. Just a bright fun film that starts off in black and white and then switches to glorious Technicolor. In England at the box office it came in second to From Russia With Love.