Be My Guest

Be My Guest

1965

bemyguest-1
Directed and produced by Lance Comfort
Original story & screenplay by Lyn Fairhurst
Musical co-ordinator Shel Talmy

82 minutes

CAST

David Hemmings- Dave
Steve Marriott – Ricky
John Pike- Phil
Andrea Monet- Erica
Ivor Salter- Herbert
Diana King – Margaret
Avril Angers – Mrs Pucil
Joyce Blair- Wanda
David Healey- Hilton Bass
Tony Wager- Arty Clough

with as themselves …
Jerry Lee Lewis
The Nashville Teens
The Zephyrs
Kenny & The Wranglers
The Niteshades
The Plebs

The 60s Retrospective series

Release dates: UK April 1965, USA March 1965

I haven’t added to the 60s Retrospective Series for a long time. A few days ago, the earlier Live It Up! with much the same characters started getting lots of hits on this site. I have no idea why, but I had this in a box set of 50s and 60s Beat films, so thought it time to check it out.

Be My Guest was the sequel to Live It Up, continuing the three characters of Dave (David Hemmings), Ricky (Steve Marriott) and Phil (John Pike). They lost Heinz Burt. Well, no one would be in tears over that. In the 1963 film, David Hemmings and Steve Marriott were nowhere near their later status. This film captures them soon before Blow Up for Hemmings and right before The Small Faces for Marriott. The film also has Avril Angers as housekeeper, and I’ve worked with her. Twenty years later, she was in our first video series, A Weekend Away, and she was a lovely person.

Steve Marriott as Ricky, John Pike as Phil

The fact of a sequel with the same three lads indicate that Live It Up! was financially successful. As in the first, Steve Marriot, one of the greatest singers of the era, has to watch several vastly inferior singers try. Steve gets to play drums, with a most peculiar stick grip.

Don’t get excited by the poster. Jerry Lee Lewis appears once for two minutes when Dave turns on the TV to watch. The Nashville Teens get about the same in the ‘Brighton Beat Contest.’ It was the era for it, the Bournemouth Beat Contest at the Winter Gardens was a major event. They later moved it to the beach.

It was designed as a B-movie, playing in support to Morecambe & Wise in The Intelligence Men. They shifted from Pinewood Studios to Twickenham Studios, and filmed in Brighton. Unfortunately Brighton was shrouded in thick sea mist for many exteriors.

A more expensive production would have waited for mist to clear, as it does later in the day. They probably wanted early morning for empty streets and didn’t want to pay to clear them. Even the scene where mum and dad get out of the taxi at hotel, it looks like pea soup fog. They were in a hurry. I suspect they gave her the added line, ‘It’ll be fine … on a fine day‘ to excuse the murk. It’s like it in later shots too. They must have chosen the wrong week for the exteriors.

Erica (Andrea Monet) and Dave David Hemmings

Look at the picture above. That’s the Regency Brighton Pavilion lost in the mist, the most attractive and iconic building in the city. That’s how it is in the film, you can only just about make it out. Most viewers won’t even see it. Even on our tightly budgeted ELT filming we’d have come back later to reshoot.

It makes Brighton look most unattractive, but I grew up in Bournemouth. There’s long rivalry. We have better beaches. We think Brighton’s unattractive anyway. The subtitle was Brighton Rocks. We Bournemouth lads respond, yes, all over the beach. It’s made of rocks. Ours is soft sand. Bournemouth’s old football ground had a bank of filthy shingle behind one goal instead of terraces. It was known as Brighton Beach.

The story in brief. Dave’s mum (Diana King) and dad (Ivor Salter) have inherited an old-fashioned seaside guest house in Brighton. We start with them moving and Dave (David Hemmings) saying farewells to Ricky (Steve Marriot) and Phil (John Pike).

The type of seaside guest house would be well known to travelling theatricals. Aspidastras in the parlour. Signs with DO NOT everywhere. I still remember one in Scotland with a sign saying CONSIDER OTHER GUESTS. DO NOT FILL BATH MORE THAN TWO INCHES, and it had a line painted on the side. Dad says, ‘Home? We’ve moved into a museum!’

Diana King as Margaret, Ivor Salter as Herbert

It’s being run by the fierce Mrs Pucil (Avril Angers) as housekeeper / cook / disciplinarian, who tells off the new owners. When she watches them eating breakfast and Herbert is picking unhappily at the greasy egg, she says:

MRS PULIS: ‘I don’t approve of skipping breakfast. And I don’t like pickers either. Waste not want not, that’s my motto.’
MARGARET: Force yourself, dear.

Herbert and Mrs Pulis are at instant loggerheads.

Dave sets off to join them in Brighton in a vintage car (how 60s film directors loved vintage cars) but it breaks down. So he has to get the train.

He sits and plays his guitar in the parcel van, where he meets Erica (Andrea Monet), an American dancer who’s on her way to audition for a show in Brighton, run by Hilton Bass (David Healey). I reckon someone thought this would have a beatnik era air of riding the boxcars, hence the donkey jacket. But no, it’s just a Royal Mail parcel van.

While I was noting the make and model of guitars in the film, Karen was pointing out Erica’s classic 1965 skinny rib sweater.

David Hemmings as Dave, Andrea Monet as Erica

Hilton Bass like all American impresarios in British films is proud to be plump. Erica is broke, so Dave offers a room in the hotel. A very suspicious dad accepts that but insists Dave will be sleeping next to his parents, two floors away.

The next day Dave turns on the TV and we see Jerry Lee Lewis perform a song. That’s it. Done. Squeeze in a song. It’s called Whatcha Gonna Do. Steve Marriott was paying attention, because the first Small Faces single borrowed part of the title as Whatcha Gonnna Do ‘Bout It, a UK #14 hit.

Meanwhile Ricky and Phil have jobs as waiters on the Brighton Belle train, in white jackets with epaulettes. Yes, that’s the train that infuriated Sir Laurence Oliver when they stopped serving smoked salmon and champagne to customers in the Pullman car. Of course they mess it up, pouring hot tea over Hilton Bass and his female companion, Wanda.

David Haley as Hilton Bas, Joyce Blair as Wanda

Wanda is played by Joyce Blair (sister of Lionel, no relation to Tony). She later gets a song Gotta Get Away Now, co-written by John Barry. The choreography is dismal, so probably not by her brother. John Barry co-wrote her chart hit Christine at the height of the Profumo affair. She was credited on that as ‘Miss X’ by a record company who wanted people to believe the singer was Christine Keeler.

Erica is auditioning at the theatre, with the irascible Arty Clough, the director. They show a longish dance number. It’s supposed to be like a song, something to watch for two minutes. It’s awful.

Ricky and Phil are sacked, so stranded in Brighton. Dave puts them up in the guest house’s beach hut, which falls foul of Brighton by-laws (as it would in Bournemouth). You’re not allowed to sleep in them. The police arrive to berate Dave’s dad.

During this, Dave has got a job with the local newspaper. He is given the dogsbody jobs of making tea, and told that on his first day he’s expected to buy the cakes. In 1965 he could reply pointedly to his tormentor, ‘So what do you want? Fairy cakes?’ to laughter from the girls.

His fellow reporter persuades Bass to change the show into a beat contest, which will be won by his pals, Slash Wildly and The Cut Throats. The show’s director, Arty Clough (Tony Wager) is appalled but has to go along with it, and the newspaper sponsors the contest.

Obviously that’s a cue for Dave, Ricky and Phil to revive their group, The Smart Alecs. The bad-tempered Mrs Pucil turns out to have a heart of gold and lends them £2 so they can rent a drum kit for Ricky. Dave writes a song, Be My Guest. It has a definite surf music sound, unusually for Britain.

The Smart Alecs, David Hemmings on guitar, Steve Marriott on drums, John Pike on bass

The guest house is in trouble, and Ricky comes up with the idea of publicizing it in the song. Erica has been employed by the theatre, but not as a dancer. She has to walk around with a placard and distribute fliers. They add fliers for the guest house (Come stay with me. Satisfaction guaranteed). These, distributed by an attractive girl might give the wrong idea.

The song is supposed to be superb … it was co-written by Shel Talmy, who produced The Kinks and The Who, so it is better than the rest. Willing suspension of disbelief here … we’ll assume it is superb and everyone knows it. Because the newspaper sponsors the contest, Dave is told The Smart Alecs can’t perform on the beat contest.

Dave is invited to meet Arty at The Grand Hotel (I’ve stayed there. So did Mrs Thatcher later, which did not go well). Wanda and Arty have sorted out a deal. The film was co-produced by classic old-style music and theatre agent Harold Shampan. He understood the business:

Wanda: So when he swoons, he signs!

So instead of meeting Hilton, Dave is met by a seductive Wanda who climbs all over him until he agrees to sell her the rights to Be My Guest for £100.

David Hemmings as Dave, Joyce Blair as Wanda

He leaps at the chance. This is not unprecedented, Justin Hayward sold the rights to The Moody Blues’ Nights in White Satin to Lonnie Donegan.

The show starts, and we get a full number from Kenny & The Wranglers. This is Somebody Help Me but it’s NOT the Spencer Davis Group hit of a year later. LINK to YouTube of the song from the film.

Kenny & The Wranglers perform Somebody Help Me

So the Be My Guest song is on the show (actually performed by The Niteshades as Slash Wildly and The Cut Throats), but before that we get to see The Nashville Teens.

The Nashville Teens singers: Art Sharp & Ray Phillips

Clearly a popular hit band couldn’t “not win” so their song is treated as a guest appearance, not as a contender. I saw them at Bournemouth Pavilion around then, and they were outstandingly good with their two vocalists. The 1964 Jerry Lee Lewis album cut with The Nashville Teens as Live At The Star Club, Hamburg is rated as one of the best early live albums too.

The lads and Erica know about Arty and Wanda’s plot to fix the show. They record them talking. Then Hilton arrives.

HILTON BASS: The Mersey Sound is over. From now on it’s the Brighton Beat!

We watch various contestants. The song is sung by Slash Wildly and The Cut Throats, but then ‘ace reporter’ Dave exposes the dastardly plot on the front page of the newspaper. He is promoted.. The hotel’s in business.