“It’s completely deserted. It smells of dead holidays.” This isn’t the kind of dialog I expected in 1965’s Catch Us If You Can. By all logic, this should have been a retread of A Hard Day’s Night, except starring The Dave Clark Five.
Mind you, the movie starts out in the vein of that film, with Clark and the other four all shown living together in a decommissioned church. Their unconventional home is full of all kinds of wacky elements, like a shower that uses an inflatable raft as its base. What is odd is they aren’t a band of musicians here. Instead, they’re a group of stuntmen. That is a bizarre choice, even if Clark really did such work in many films prior to this one.
This gang appears in commercials and billboards as part of a mod ad campaign for the meat council. The real star of the ads is Barbara Ferris. Surprisingly, she is the real star of this movie, as well. How odd a real-life band doesn’t play one in their own movie, and aren’t even the stars of it. Not only that, but every person from the group, bar Clark, will be jettisoned as soon as possible.
Honestly, this works in the film’s favor, taking something that should have been a quick cash-in and instead producing something more distinctive. A tinge of melancholy creeps in around the end of the first act and builds over the rest of the runtime until it overwhelms the picture.
Honestly, I would have been surprised if the picture didn’t take a left turn at some point, as it was helmed by John Boorman. Everybody has to start somewhere, but you know the guy whose later career is defined by such films as Deliverance and Excalibur will deviate from expectations one might have for a film like this.
Stealing a car from a commercial shoot, Clark and Ferris try to get to an old holiday resort island she’s interested in buying. The journey is far from straight-forward and plagued by strange detours. Also, the movie takes place in winter, so the scenery is starkly beautiful at best, though one could just as easily describe it as bleak.
The first place they stop at is what appears to be a town that wasn’t rebuilt following the war. In one building, they find proto-hippies that are so bored with pot that they are looking for heroin. Ever notice how movies starring The Beatles never have a plot point where they try to score some horse?
Then it turns out this abandoned town is a training ground for the military. There’s live rounds being fired and explosions everywhere, one which takes out their purloined car. The Dylan wannabes are corralled by the army guys, and they sing “We Shall Overcome” (or something very similar to that), which greatly amused me.
Now without transportation, our unlucky couple takes to hitching a ride. They get picked up by an older couple (Robin Bailey and Yootha Joyce) who take them back to their home. To my surprise, this couple swings less in the sense of the 1960’s and more in the vein of 1970’s suburbia and notorious “key parties”. Neither Clark nor Ferris succumbs to the advances made towards them.
Actually, Bailey is very meek and seems embarrassed to be put in the position of trying to seduce the younger woman. He instead seems intent on sharing with Ferris the joy he takes in his collection of old media. She’s bored at first, but then she becomes intrigued by these moments preserved from the past, as if in amber. The performers, captured in their prime, are singing better than they ever would again and looking the best they ever would. Ferris remarks, “Isn’t it awful how everybody has to get old? How everything has to get broken.”
That is a theme I noticed recurring through the feature—the idea that everything is ephemeral, each moment never to be repeated. There was something about Clark’s performance that made me think that even before the topic is broached. He’s not a bad actor, per se, but you know he wouldn’t be in this movie if a studio hadn’t hoped to emulate the success of the first Beatles film. He consistently looks as if he knows this movie is a one-off thing.
I noticed many of the scenes he is in with Ferris focus on her, even when we’re hearing his dialog. This was a smart creative choice, as she’s definitely the best actor in the film. Also, she resembles Bjork a bit, but blond.
One interesting decision for Clark’s character is how strait-laced they made him. Over the course of the film, he eschews smokes, drinks, drugs and the advances made by Joyce.
One thing I couldn’t stop thinking about is how the music of The Dave Clark Five is digenic in several scenes; however, in the world of the movie, who would have made that music? I mean, the guys in that real-life band don’t play musicians in this film. So, who is supposed to be The Dave Clark Five in the The Dave Clark Five movie?
Speaking of the other guys in the band, there’s an odd moment where everybody is trying on costumes, and one them briefly puts on a long fake nose that instantly made him look like Malcolm McDowell from a key scene in A Clockwork Orange.
Another random observation is I will not soon forget the incredibly weird vehicle that will transport Clark and Ferris across the water to the island where the holiday resort is located. This thing is basically a canopy covering a platform placed a full story above its base of tank treads. I sooo want to take a ride on that thing.
It is no surprise the island they have been trying to get to this entire time will just be another in a long series of disappointments. As Ferris puts it, “Not even a proper island, just a gimmick in the sea.” That is the perfect way to cap Catch Us If You Can, a movie that didn’t give me what I was expecting. Instead, it gave me a far richer experience which I look forward to revisiting eventually.
Dir: John Boorman
Starring Dave Clark and the others in The Dave Clark Five, Barbara Ferris
Watched on StudioCanal UK blu-ray (region B)