Thanks for the memories!

Sick Product of a Sick System

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Richard Lester directed, 'A Hard Day's Night'. which came out the year before this Boorman classic and has cast a heavy shadow over it ever since its release. The fact that 'Catch Us If You Can' is a better movie matters not for, Dave Clark Five were not The Beatles. The whole look of the Boorman film is great, properly anticipating the changes in architecture and advertising and the spot on script by Peter Nichols, is faultless. We see the 'kids' gambolling about like clowns or tearing about in their mini-moke or jaguar cars, but always noticing in the background, at the end of the street, along the pavements, the bewildered look of passers by. Straight out of the fifties, with their hats and scarves and overcoats, properly reflecting that whilst the youngsters were pushing for something/anything in the early 60s, for the adult population, even of London, it was all more than a little strange, something from another world, that will soon go away. I remember liking this upon its original release and whilst connecting with it and considering it an exciting first film from a new director, it did seem a shame the songs weren't better and it was far from cool to admit any liking for Dave Clark and his 'bang bang' drumming. So the film has been ignored, which is sad, because now were both films played side by side, the Beatles film music probably wouldn't seem that much better. Another shame for me is that the lovely Barbara Ferris seemed to go down with the film too, here she has a lot of work to do playing off Mr Clark, who carries himself well enough but knows his limitations. See this film for its excellent picture of UK c.1964/5 and for the sheer joie de vivre and the marvellous free flowing cinematography.

I went into "Catch Us If You Can" expecting a pallid DC5 rip-off of "A Hard Days Night." Well, it is that all right, but director John Boorman also reaches for something more by abruptly separating the two main stars (Dave Clark – inexplicably named 'Steve' -- and sunny Barbara Ferris) from the madcap Swinging London antics and plunging them into a existential search for meaning in a superficial world obsessed with celebrity. So there are lots of brooding looks on the part of 'Steve' and shallow ruminations on the pressures of fame from Ferris. On their journey they meet a pack of drugged-out hippies squatting in a military bombing site, a disaffected upper-class couple who adopt the pair as a sort of kinky project, and a man who operates a Western dude ranch in southern Devon.To satisfy what few remaining DC5 fans were coerced into seeing this film, the rest of the rock group is brought in at intervals to dance and leap about. But their presence is never really explained. They're not portrayed as a rock group (their songs are heard on the soundtrack but no musical instruments are in evidence) but as 'stunt boys' who all live together in what appears to be a refurbished church/gym. There's a definite homoerotic tone as they shower and work out and eat breakfast together.Oh, and there's also a subplot on the cynical nature of advertising involving Ferris' managers and his ad agency cohorts. The whole thing comes off as something of a mess, albeit a watchable one, with bleak shots of the wintry English countryside and 1960s London. A definite curiosity.

More road movie than rock movie, CATCH has a surprisingly mature, melancholy tone for a British beat picture. That it has any tone at all is a tribute to director Boorman, whose characteristic fusion of the mythic with the ordinary is already evident in this his first movie, and writer Peter Nichols, who imbues the surprisingly engaging supporting characters with a quality of personal yearning and need for escape that spans generations. Boorman's preoccupation with water, rigorous yet dreamlike use of landscape and tendency to celebrate or at least acknowledge the antiquated are just as vivid here as they are in HOPE AND GLORY. Too detailed and ambling to be anything but opaque or irrelevant on video, I suspect.

Recently I bought the DVD of "A Hard Day's Night", and spent a whole weekend watching and re-watching it. You might gather from this that I love the movie, as indeed I do, so what I'm going to say now may very well shock you: "Catch Us If You Can" is a better movie. Of course it wouldn't exist without the pioneering example of "A Hard Day's Night", which changed youth/pop movies for ever, but it really is a better movie.I'm always inclined to see it as the final instalment of an early- to mid-60s trilogy of movies that began with Ken Russell's "French Dressing", and continued with Michael Winner's "The System". (I'm tempted to extend this to a tetralogy, with Richard Lester's "The Knack" as the last instalment. But, unlike the other movies, "The Knack" was a critical and commercial success - Palme D'Or at Cannes, and all that.) There's a continuity of mood, if not theme, between these movies, a strange mixture of exhilaration and wistfulness. The "phoney" 60s, a sort of hangover of the late 50s, lasted in Britain until about 1962 (although there were intimations of what was to come in Anthony Newley's "The Strange World of Gurney Slade"), but the Satire Boom, followed quickly by the Beatles, ushered in the real 1960s."Catch Us If You Can" takes a number of audacious risks from the very start: the Dave Clark Five are not a pop group playing themselves, but a team of stuntmen working on a series of TV commercials; their songs are performed off-screen as the soundtrack to the on-screen action; the movie insists strongly on the wintry season in which it was filmed: the frozen milk, the unbearably cold conditions of the meat warehouse, the orange growing safely inside the glass conservatory, the snowy countryside.There is little of the lightness of mood of "A Hard Day's Night". "Catch Us If You Can", like its saturnine hero, Steve (Dave Clark), is strangely downbeat and melancholy. Not even the kittenish Dinah (Barbara Ferris) is capable of raising Steve's mood of dejection for very long. Absconding from the commercial they are filming, Steve and Dinah make an erratic Pilgrim's Progress across the West Country en route to an island, off the coast of Devon, that Dinah is contemplating buying. On the way they meet a group of proto-hippies (the term would not be in widespread use until the middle of 1966) squatting in abandoned buildings on Salisbury Plain, and a bickering middle-aged couple living in the opulent surroundings of Bath's Royal Crescent. In a sense, all of these people are in flight from the modern world.The ultimate source of Steve's dejection is Leon Zissell, the svengali-like advertising executive, who is quite evidently besotted with Dinah. Zissell casts his shadow wherever the absconding couple might find themselves.Guy and Nan, the bickering middle-aged couple, seem somewhat sinister at first, but they show themselves to be essentially good-hearted. Both are collectors, and we initially assume that Steve and Dinah are to be added to their collections. Actually, Nan collects old clothes, while Guy collects old phonograph recordings, photographs, etc., ("The pop art of yesteryear"). Anyone viewing "Catch Us If You Can" nearly forty years on will see how it has now been added to Guy's collection itself, a clever and telling touch. (Touching, too.)The Austin Powers movies, funny and clever as they often are, have seriously distorted younger people's perceptions of the 1960s. Amidst all the "grooviness" there was always a quieter, more reflective aspect to the 60s (e.g. "Blow-Up"), and "Catch Us If You Can" captures this. Clear your mind of preconceptions: this movie is NOT a failed attempt at re-making "A Hard Day's Night", but a brilliantly successful attempt to make something quite different - a thoughtful, grown-up film that stands the test of time.