Aka - Having a Wild Weekend
For a brief shining moment in the mid-1960s The Dave Clark Five were as popular
as the Beatles. They wrote most of their songs and had a strong drum driven
beat provided by Dave Clark. They had a series of gems - Glad All Over, Bits
and Pieces, Having a Wild Weekend, Over and Over Again, Because, Do You Love
Me - but damn you would never know it by this movie. What a colossal bore.
Shockingly so considering they had a band that was enormously popular at
the time. This was during the same period that a bunch of Brit bands were
putting out films - only A Hard Day's Night was great - but the others were
at least congenial, silly, personable and played a bunch of their songs.
This feels like the director was trying to make an Antonioni film. Lugubrious,
slow and pointless. The energy of a used light bulb. What were the filmmakers
thinking? Not about the young audience for sure.
The first problem is they don't play themselves or even a faint imitation
of themselves. They are just a bunch of lads with no particular skills or
ambitions. They have been hired to be extras on a campaign to advertise meat.
Meat. Nothing more exciting than that. Steve (Dave Clark) has struck up a
friendship with the model in the ads - Dinah (Barbara Ferris) that never
really ventures into romance. One day they both are sick of the whole thing
and decide to take off for a while. And they walk to instrumental music.
They drive to instrumental music. They walk some more to instrumental music.
They go out into the country and come across a hippie commune and are there
when the military rousts them with grenades. Wth. They go on and meet a married
couple who want to bed them but throw a party where they dress up as the
Marx Brothers. They drive some more to instrumental music - or maybe it was
one of their songs (four of them are played over scenes). The advertising
corporation let out that she has been kidnapped by him to drum up publicity.
In the end the corporation wins and our boys have learned a life lesson.
The Money Men always win. Dreadful film. Considering my expectations.
So who is the director you might ask. Holy cow. One of the great directors.
In his debut theatrical film. John Boorman whose next film two years later
would be this little thing called Point Blank with Deliverance and Excalibur
a few years down the line. Marianne Faithful had been offered the model role
but turned it down. She would have made this palatable. Apparently, the film
received good reviews from the very hip critics like Crowther of the New
York Times and Pauline Kael who found it pleasant. Like a nail in my shoe.
Perhaps I am being unduly harsh but if this was the film they wanted to make,
why on earth would you hire five non-actors to do it. If you have the DC5,
you damn better make use of their actual talent. Which was music. As to the
DC5 they lasted until 1970 but they never evolved with the music and Revolver
and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band and new groups like Jefferson
Airplane and the Doors made their music out of date.
