Dave Clark Five - Catch Us If You Can

Bits and pieces, but no real substance

A Hard Day’s Night it ain’t. The Fab Four’s foray into film was bound to spawn imitators, but this disjointed 1965 vehicle for the Tottenham stompers had moviegoers frowning over their popcorn. The opening sequences are crammed full of suitably wacky moptop-esque shenanigans, and then events take the most baffling of detours…

Clark plays a movie stuntman who, disillusioned with Swinging London, bolts for the countryside with a posh model dolly bird. This causes consternation among the ‘suits’, because the girl is needed to front a national advertising campaign for (wait for it…) meat. As the young ’uns race to stay ahead of their pursuers, they fall in with a bunch of pot-smoking drop-outs, hook up with a couple of middle-aged, middle-class wannabe beatniks, and, erm, that’s it.

There’s not a single musical performance by the band themselves, although snippets of about half a dozen of their songs are used to link each headscratching scenario. First-time director John Boorman (later to helm classics Point Blank and Deliverance) may have been attempting a comment on celebrity as commodity, or the isolation that comes with fame, but his approach bears the hallmarks of a mannered Harold Pinter stage play. Hardly what the core audience of screaming teens wanted.

2 stars 2 stars

Optimum | OPTD 0898

Reviewed by Terry Staunton
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