Wonderful Life

Wonderful Life

1964

Screenshot 2020-06-30 at 12.01.01

Directed by Sidney J. Furie
Written by Ronald Cass and Peter Myers
Produced by Kenneth Harper
Choreography by Gillian Lynne
Music by Stanley Black
Soundtrack produced by Norrie Paramor

CAST

Cliff Richard – Johnnie
Walter Slezack- Lloyd Davis, a film director
Susan Hampshire – Jenny Taylor
Hank B. Marvin – self (The Shadows)
Brian Bennett- self (The Shadows)
Bruce Welch – self (The Shadows)
John Rostill – self (The Shadows)
Melvyn Hayes- Jerry
Richard O’Sullivan – Edward
Una Stubbs – Barbara Tate
Derek Bond – Douglas Leslie
Gerald Harper – Sheikh / Scotsman / Harold
Joe Cuby- Miguel

Release Date UK – 3 July 1964, USA as Swinger’s Paradise

Completism? It is the third of the Kenneth Harper produced Cliff Richard films, and it came in the same three disc box set. Have I seen it before? Definitely not. In 1964, no one I knew would have been seen dead going to a Cliff movie. How things had changed since The Young Ones and Summer Holiday. Never mind, they had Sidney J. Furie back from The Young Ones, with Melvyn Hayes and Richard O’Sullivan, then Una Stubbs from Summer Holiday.

This review is a kaleidoscope of pictures, because the strongest point was the wide variety of pastiches they did.

It was a third Myers-Cass script. These are the guys who wrote the abysmal A Swinging Affair for Summer Holiday. Then the American title was, ouch!, Swinger’s Paradise, conjuring up Hugh Hefner, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jnr, Dean Martin …NOT a Cliff sort of thing. Maybe they should retitle it Dogger’s Paradise for the 21st century and be done with it. The American adaptation was truncated by thirty minutes which lost it any vestige of sense.

In retrospect, both Cliff and The Shadows enhanced their careers by ignoring the tide of Merseybeat and R&B. Cliff has said that with The Young Ones he consciously moved to all-round entertainer / the family audience. They sailed on, but they lost my age group. Well, not entirely. They retained huge and fiercely loyal audiences … Cliff’s mainly female, The Shadows’ mainly male. But it was to be the mid-70s before I seriously wanted to listen to Cliff again after Summer Holiday. By some accounts, Wonderful Life was a turkey. Had the audience changed? Or had the production team behind it become so complacent after the success of the two before that they thought they could do no wrong?

After the string of #1 hits from the previous two, On The Beach was a mere #7. The Shadows Theme For Young Lovers was #12. Cliff Richard reading the telephone book would have made the Top Ten.

On the other hand, the LP of Wonderful Life got to #3 in the New Musical Express album chart and stayed in the chart for twenty-three weeks. It was #2 in the more conservative Record Retailer chart used by the Guinness chart books. As a frequenter of second-hand record stores, I can attest that the album turns up a lot. The first EP reached a respectable #3 on the EP chart, and EPs still mattered. The second and third EPs didn’t chart, but as with Summer Holiday, the second and third EPs were mainly the Myers-Cass stage musical stuff. They had learned from recent Beatles and Rolling Stones EP releases with the first one- released, that is, make the EP free-standing, not both sides of two previous singles.

The film was the fifth highest grossing British film of 1964. Pretty good, but for Cliff a major downward step. A major issue was that they started pre-production in December 1963, moving to Gran Canaria in January 1964. They knew that they should have followed the other two with a January launch, but Cliff had a major 1963 Summer Show in Blackpool, which delayed production.

The film premiered three days before A Hard Day’s Night. That’s the most significant factor. Summer Holiday’s long run at #1 had been ended when The Beatles released Please Please Me. The Wonderful Life LP spent the summer of 1964 at #3. The Rolling Stones were #2. A Hard Day’s Night was #1. Sidney J. Furie had been invited to direct A Hard Day’s Night but had already contracted to do Wonderful Life. Richard Lester gained. To paraphrase the Alliance & Leicester TV advert, The smarter investor gets Richard Lester.

Cliff knew:

Cliff Richard: The Beatles were doing films that were really avant garde movies at the time. We were trying to do films that were one step from The Young Ones and Summer Holiday, but they were not different enough.

The film had a higher budget than the other two, £350,000. It ballooned to £750,000. Original plans had been to film in Mexico with a Western cowboy plot. It was too expensive. Why did the budget run away? Someone decided Gran Canaria in January would be a semi-tropical paradise. I was once at a conference for Canary Islands teachers in Las Palmas in January. It was cool, cloudy, and humid … when it stopped raining. The weather in 1964 was so bad that they contemplated a move to Puerto Rico halfway.

No one seems to have liked the film, not even Bruce Welch:

Bruce Welch: It was shot on location in the Canary Islands, and I’m sure no one knew what the film was about. We certainly didn’t. It was all very confusing, and it appeared that the film was being written as it went along. It was to have been a western set in Mexico, and (that) ended up as a film-within-a-film. We spent three weeks on location … and none of us knew what the hell was going on from one minute to the next. Most of the filming took place on the sand dunes. We dressed up in a lot of costumes and that was about it. There was a ten minute sequence in the middle of the film on the history of movies, which was excellent- the rest of the film stank. It took twelve weeks in all of complete and utter boredom … Despite a poor script we wrote some good songs for the movie.
Bruce Welch: Rock ‘n’ Roll, I Gave You The Best Years of My Life

In the scriptwriters’ defence, when inclement and unexpected weather hits you, you have to ‘write as you go along.’ I’ve had to amend scripts while filming in Oxfordshire in sudden snow, and on Glastonbury Tor when a freak thunderstorm soaked all our schoolkid extras, and they had to be sent home. Let alone when a lead actor’s partner had a baby early, he raced back to London, and we had to recast and rewrite the episode before filming the next day.

Cliff Richard: For the first couple of days, everything was fine when we filmed in a place called Masapalomas. And then when we came to do close ups the next day, it had rained and everything was black. It looked more like a Welsh mining village than a tropical island. So we waited and waited, and when the rain eventually stopped, the sand took four days to dry out and regain its colour. Our stint there was terrible.
Quoted in ‘Sidney J. Furie: A Life in Films by Daniel Kramer

On call sheets, the “History of The Movies” sequence in the middle was listed as “Bad weather stand-by.”

Susan Hampshire also felt the experience was negative.

Susan Hampshire: I didn’t want to do Wonderful Life. I was sort of persuaded to do it by my agent. Then I was given a hard time by the press when it was released … Sidney seemed very agitated all the time, because I think he was under a great deal of pressure. He was a completely different human being than he was in ‘During One Night.’ He couldn’t say anything cross to Cliff under any circumstances, because Cliff had his entourage, and his people were on set every day. But with me, I think because he knew me, he could be rather abrupt and unpleasant.
Quoted in ‘Sidney J. Furie: A Life In Films by Daniel Kramer

Cliff was negative too:

Cliff Richard: Wonderful Life was a flop. It was a disaster from the word go.
Stafford Hildred: Cliff An Intimate Portrait of A Living Legend

However, one of the technical joys of the film was a newly perfected zoom lens, which received a technical Oscar in 1964.

Sidney J. Furie: We went a little crazy using the zoom lens on that picture. Almost the entire opening twenty minutes of the movie are elaborate zoom outs. They oohed and ahhed over it at the time, believe me.

When I say the film is much maligned … check these comments:

COMMENTS

Even Cliff can’t sing his way out of this! … This bloodsome bore of a film, in which they’ve sabotaged the boy. Torpedoed him. Drowned him in drivel.
Leonard Mosely, 1964

Sidney J. Furie is an on-the-ball director but he has a tough struggle with some of the material at his disposal. Tighter editing would have kept the tempo at highest pitch.
Variety, 1964

Slight but zestful youth musical with highly illogical detail; the highlight is a ten minute spoof history of the movies.
Helliwell’s Film Guide

It just doesn’t work thanks to a thin storyline, poor script and less than memorable musical numbers. It relies heavily on Cliff Richard to make it work and he does a very good job but everything about it is so weak even his energy and enthusiasm can’t make it any better.
Movie Scene, online

There is a contrary view:

Wonderful Life is a stellar example of the musical-comedy-fantasy at the top of its form. Even better than its immediate predecessor, Summer Holiday, here Cliff Richard and gang let loose in a highly satirical cinematic free-for-all which really has no equal. Released in the US merely weeks after the musical juggeraut The Sound of Music, Wonderful Life may even be the better of the two films, as it lacks the Fox blockbuster’s heavy-handed solemnity and overt political agenda. Wonderful Life is an innocent and enthusiastic homage to the movies, and indeed is a film-within-a film story worthy of note.
Rob Craig: American International Pictures: A Comprehensive Filmography

wonderful_life-432994646-large

Read on.

PLOT

The Young Ones cast reunited: Richard O’Sullivan, Melvyn Hayes & Cliff Richard

Johnnie (Cliff Richard), Jerry (Melvyn Hayes) and Edward (Richard O’Sullivan) are waiters on a cruise liner. It opens with them waiting for a last drunken passenger to drink up and go to bed.

Cliff Richard, Hank Marvin – harp, John Rostill- clarinet, Brian Bennett- violin, Bruce welch – cello

The Shadows are the band (not on the Titanic), with harp, clarinet, violin and cello. They’re yawning.

Cliff is getting a guitar too.

Once they’ve seen the last of the passenger, they go to their cabin … bunks for all seven of them and pick up electric guitars.

Richard O’Sullivan and Melvyn Hayes. At least they didn’t use bare wires and matchsticks (we used to)

Edward is putting more and more plugs into adaptors on a single socket and BANG they blow all the ship’s electrics. Not uncommon practice with bands in 1964, in fact. The scriptwriters do really, really like a bang and puffs of smoke in these films.

All at sea. There are long shots. With seven in a tiny rubber boat it looks risky.

They’re on a life boat … all seven, and The Shadows have lines, which they never had in the other two films. Jerry is put over board to push the boat when a shark turns up. Cue credits to the title song, A Wonderful Life. They start paddling the boat through the busy harbour at Las Palmas (Gran Canaria) using guitars as paddles. They dock, and everyone’s asleep in the rubber dinghy. Cliff (it will be easier than Johnnie) sees a shapely girl in a tartan skirt and hat and resorts to the vernacular.

Johnnie: fellers, birds!

Everyone leaps up and leaves the boat in speeded up film. Cue for a song, There’s A Girl In Every Port. They all follow her, singing and dancing … The Shadows too. She gets onto a camel … a tourist camel ride.

Susan Hampshire spent more time with camels than most would want to

They board two horse drawn cabs and follow her. I’m amazed they allowed Cliff to jump out while it was moving in a dance step- a twisted ankle could have been disaster. Anyway, they finally catch up with a camel, only to find a Scotsman with beard and pipe on it.

They assemble in a café to ask Johnnie if he’s found them a new ship. The captain who threw them off has had them blacklisted so no one will employ them. A cheerful friendly Spanish photographer, Miguel, takes their picture. They ask for a suggestion for a job, and he says they’re looking for banana pickers in the south.

They trek along a sand dune … every 60s director did the group on a sloping hill in a line shot. I suspect it goes back to Westerns. There’s dramatic Stanley Black music, and looking back, the film genre spoof that runs through was already starting. They sit by a cow’s skull in the sand, and Jerry hears a ship’s siren and sees a mirage of a ship. He runs towards it chased by Johnnie and Edward … and then they all see it. They dream of Home!

That will be the song Home then, filmed on the River Thames near Battersea Power Station and heading east. Cliff, Melvyn Hayes and Richard O’Sullivan as a Music Hall trio. It’s another Myers-Cass VERY old-fashioned musical number. Did they need extra footage and have to do it in London? Again, it’s the sound of the middle-aged songwriter striving to be up-to-date with the mods and rockers reference:

Home, is the dance hall on a Saturday night
Home, where everybody starts out being polite
Home, until the mods and the rockers start a fight

Home

They end with a tap dance, lovable Cockney accents and a touch of Pearly Kings and Queens dancing. They’d dropped American choreographer Herbert Ross, who hadn’t got on with Furie, and engaged Gillian Lynne instead. I did lights on Pearl Carr and Teddy Johnson doing this kind of dance routine in 1967 and it was painfully old hat then. It was ancient in 1964 too. I did admire the ability of all three to dance, tap and somersault though. They all look like professional dancers. The Frankie Vaughan straw boaters routine groaned.

They lean back on the stern of the boat and they’re back rolling down the sand dune at high speed in close up … that super zoom lens does its job, and they come to a stop for the last line of the song. Good cut. When you know to look for film references you see them.

Richard O’Sullivan and Melvyn Hayes – a natural comedy duo

Edward thinks he can smell bananas and Jerry slaps him round the face back and forth with a banana skin … Laurel and Hardy. There’s also a shift to using Hayes and O’Sullivan as a comedy double act.

Suddenly a woman appears on a runaway camel! They race to save her. Johnnie is in front. The chase again utilises that zoom camera so we can see him tiny on the skyline and running right up to camera. Let’s imagine that he can outrun a camel on sand dunes (great Stanley Black incidental music here). He catches the rope and is dragged through the sand. Some would be a stunt double, but some at least is Cliff himself.

Cliff is knackered after being dragged a long way by the camel

Jerry asks her where the bananas are and everyone including the camel repeats ‘Bananas.’

Lloyd Davis, the film director (Walter Slezak)

Our gang of seven listen to Lloyd Davis. The Shadows are integrated into the action

Finally we see the film director, Lloyd Davis (Walter Slezak), for they have interrupted a scene from a movie! (Always a good twist. Hands up, I’ve done that in ELT video scripts at least twice …). They have ruined a scene that has taken him two days to set up. The girl in wispy (imaginary) Eastern garb on the camel is Jenny Taylor (Susan Hampshire). Douglas Leslie (Derek Bond), the guy who was supposed to save her is dressed in French Foreign Legion uniform, and is terrified of his prop camel seat, which is hanging from a rope.

Slezak, who was Austrian, but long domiciled in the USA has a perfect indefinable film director accent. So Lloyd Davis the director offers Johnnie a job:

Lloyd: My boy, forgive an old man too quickly roused to anger. Don’t interrupt me. How would you like to have a job that will make you the envy of every young man in the world … double, and stunt man, for that great star … Douglas Leslie!

Selzak has great comic timing … Johnnie goes to shake hands It’s a deal, and Selzak steps back … Don’t be too familiar!

The Great Star Douglas Leslie (Derek Bond)

Meanwhile, Douglas has fainted in terror. Lloyd gives the rest of Johnnie’s group jobs as production runners, and The Shadows take on a job as permanent chamber orchestra. . He directs Johnnie to the scriptwriter, Barbara Tate (Una Stubbs).

Una Stubbs as Barbara Tate, the scriptwriter. Note that dark sky. Not very desert-like

Barbara asks them to call her ‘Bunty’ (it was a popular girls’ comic at the time). Anyway, she knows where the bananas are … just round the corner – and takes them there. They skip off – we now have a gang of four.

Later that evening, Johnnie goes to a restaurant. A blonde woman (Susan Hampshire) sitting at another table reading loud from a script. So is Johnnie … they realize they’re swapping lines. She explains that she is Jenny Taylor, and she was the woman that he tried to “save” on the camel, when she was wearing a dark wig and yashmak. She invites him to sit at her table. It turns out that Johnnie and the boys saw her in the London Paladium pantomime as the Sultan’s daughter … also wearing a yashmak. (This may have been mild product placement as Cliff and The Shadows were lined up for the Christmas 1964 panto, Aladdin.) She is very nervous because she doesn’t believe that she can throw herself wholeheartedly into the role of the sheik’s daughter, but Johnnie tells her just to imagine that she isn’t acting, and that she really is a princess. My goodness, Myers-Cass telegraph those song cues by a mile … so we get A Little Imagination.

Naturally that starts in the restaurant and goes into …er, imagination. Most of it is soaring Stanley Black orchestration.

This is worth a series of pictures, because it comes before the acclaimed “Golden Age of Hollywood” film pastiche later in the film, but is doing much the same.

Both dance, and have a backing team of dancers. I went to Karen’s dance expertise for this. She says Cliff is not a trained dancer, but has worked incredibly hard for a singer. He does very well, but is not a “natural.” She thought Susan Hampshire exceptionally talented at dancing with great natural ability (for an actor, she added) but you could see her professional training was restricted. The choreographer knew when and how to use them, but Karen thought the routines were unoriginal in concept even for 1964. We admit they were deliberately pastiching classic routines though.

At least one set … the cruise liner … must have been done next to the opening scene of the film.

A Little Imagination. We get … A luxury cruise ship first.

Then an 18th century ball.

Next, a cowboy hoe down dance in a corral. Jenny and Johnnie on the left. Oklahoma? Annie Get Your Gun?

A couple of hoboes on a country road. The palm trees signal Hollywood 1930s, though it’s Gran Canaria. I’m sure it’s a classic movie reference. Easter Parade has Fred Astaire and Judy Garland as hoboes (We’re a couple of swells) though with an urban backdrop. I’m sure there’s a country road one too. Comment if you know what it is.

The hoboes morph into a couple in evening dress who move into a ballroom dance,

We get beat generation on a beach. They don’t join the dance in this one.

A romantic heroine on a cliff, with Cliff playing grand piano in Rachmaninov fashion. The zoom is getting a lot of use. When it started I thought she was a ship’s figurehead!

A Hawaiian beach with Cliff playing guitar, and Susan Hampshire in black wig and grass skirt. It enables Cliff to do an Elvis-in-Hawaii wink at the end too. Blue Hawaii? Paradise- Hawaiian Style?

Flamenco dancers, wisely they only watch … that would be too specialist dancing. Is that Tio Pepe sherry on the table?

Then a US college marching band with cheerleaders. Good baton twirling from Cliff and Susan, which must have taken some practice. Then we rewind through brief glimpses of the scenes at dazzling speed. Excellent cutting here.

Myers-Cass use their trademark return from a long instrumental to the last two lines of the song, then (as in The Young Ones) Cliff disappears … she has imagined him out of the picture. She disappears herself too.

Cut to Lloyd Davis arguing on the phone. He wants to film an orgy scene.

Lloyd Davis: I can’t say it’s an orgy with only two other slave girls. That’s a vicarage tea party. I want two other slave girls flown in by Sunday. You tell Head Office that when I make a picture, I make a picture not a snapshot.

Douglas Leslie comes in. Lloyd gives him some pills and explains his directing methods.

Lloyd Davis: After all these films, do I still have to explain my method to you? I keep them waiting. They all hate me. Up goes the adrenaline level. I get better results.

I bet they had fun with filming that. I’ve worked with a director on my ELT video Mystery Tour who had just that theory and explained it to me … the cast and crew should hate him. It worked. They did.

Bunty (Una Stubbs), Edward (Richard O’Sullivan), Jerry (Melvyn Hayes).

So Lloyd thinks they’ll all be waiting for him, tense ready to spring into action. We cut to the beach where everyone is lounging about. Jerry and Edwards as runners are serving tea and biscuits. Yes, that’s what would be happening!

They find Johnnie strumming a guitar with Jenny, and The Shadows playing cards. Myers-Cass are obsessed with song cues:

Jerry: Oh, I feel so depressed.
Johnnie: Alright, there’s only one thing to do … one two three …

On The Beach

And we’re into On The Beach. Jerry, Edward and Jenny watch and … hand jive. On See a girl and go and get her … Johnnie grabs Jenny’s hand and they dance. Hank Marvin has switched to the sponsored green Burns guitar with the ugly headstock, but gets a surprisingly George Harrison sound on the solo. The lyrics reference the Bossa Nova and Twist and Shout. Hank Marvin quotes the chords from the middle eight of The Beatles version of Twist & Shout in the solo.

Douglas is back telling Lloyd Davis that the reason he is delaying the day’s filming is because he’s worried sick about the film … and adds a heartfelt So am I! Lloyd says the film is a remake and the dialogue doesn’t sound good any more. Lloyd says the problem is Jenny. She’s terrible!

On the set, Jenny (in yashmak) is acting out a scene from the film with Douglas. The Shadows are a chamber quartet at the side. I keep picking up these Golden Age film references. Read The Parade’s Gone By. Silent film had musicians on set playing to give the mood to the actors. A 1920s chase scene had musicians playing on a flat bed truck following the action.

In the scene here, Susan Hampshire as Jenny is giving a deliberate wooden delivery.

Lloyd: Cut! Miss Taylor, there are many that would argue that your most attractive feature is the back of your head. However, I’m not making a new-wave, avant-garde film. LOOK AT THE CAMERA!

It’s interesting how the screen Jenny and screen director mirror Susan Hampshire’s comments on Sidney J. Furie’s attitude to her. Douglas has to be shot by tribesmen next and, Johnnie has to stand in. He has to thump a tribesman and run away… all to the strains of the William Tell Overture. Trouble is, in the final part of the fight he really does get knocked out. Johnnie wakes up to find Jenny and the gang round him. Jenny is depressed at her poor performances.

The crew have left for the day, and Johnnie suggests taking over the equipment, shooting some film and showing her that she IS good. Bunty says to Edward, You know how to work the camera, don’t you? He goes to the wrong end. Jerry takes over sound recording and boom mic. They’ll re-do the scene. It still sounds terrible and the sound recorder picks up a radio horse race.

Jenny: It’s no use. I just can’t say that dialogue.
Johnnie: But you were great.
Jenny: Just now? You must be joking.
Johnnie: Maybe not just now, but last time at the Paladium, you were fabulous!
Jenny: It was different. I was singing.
Johnnie: Well, sing it now! We’ll do the whole scene as a song.

Usefully, he tells her to forget that the accompaniment is just Bruce and Hank on acoustic guitars, but to imagine a BIG orchestra instead. Interesting how rarely the sudden appearance of an orchestra on a soundtrack gets such a justification. We’re into In The Stars. They run up two sand dunes and that magic zoom lens gets to do its job again. And again. And again. It’s like a zoom lens demo film.

Strangely breast like sand dunes

It’s a duet, though she doesn’t get a credit on the album sleeve. They run several hundred metres on the sand dunes … Gran Canaria is on the same latitude as the Sahara. It reminded me of driving through Death Valley, California, where there is also a set of perfect sand dunes, used in hundreds of movies. It’s an incredibly small area.

Yet again, I found myself thinking, ‘Great filming. Gorgeous orchestration. Shame about the song.’

They watch back the sequence in a viewing theatre. At the back, Edward and Jerry are arguing over whether it was the camera or the sound that made it so good. This is a running joke that runs so often that it’s stretched to breaking point.

Johnnie says that if Jenny is constrained by the yashmak, throw it away.

They are assembled to meet Lloyd, who is furious that she has thrown away her yashmak. He asks who was responsible … they all put their hands up. (Movie reference: Spartacus)

Back to the studio. Edward thinks that they could make a full motion picture! They agree and Johnnie says they’ve all seen motion pictures so … We’ve seen it all. The cue line for the song We Love The Movies.

We Love The Movies section

The We Love The Movies section runs thirteen minutes and required more than sixty costume changes.

The movies as institution have been taken apart, drawn and quartered in a most delightful and unexpected way in the guise of a British rock ‘n’ roll film.
Motion Picture Herald 1964

The first section breaks behind the fourth wall again and again to reveal the artifice.

We start with a tight close up of Johnny in the cockpit as if flying, but the camera moves back to reveal the prop wingless plane with stage hands (The Shadows) moving it.

We see them running in close up, then we move back to see it’s back projection, they they run towards us past the cameras.

A tight close up on Johnny singing, then zoom out to reveal the stairs suspended in the studio.

The full Errol Flynn in a torture chamber. She is on the rack. A very elaborate scene.

The next section starts close up on the stage as a musical, then Johnny & Jenny walk off the stage and through the lights and cameras again.

Then Edward talks about significant moments in film history.

Edward: Chaplin, Valentino, Fairbanks, Pickford. What do these names mean to you? Jolson, Garbo, Astaire, Rogers, Lamor, Boyer, Grable. What do they mean? For they are the movies. Unless you know about them, about the world they lived in, thir history, then you know nothing!

Richard O’ASullivan as Charlie Chaplin

It starts with Charlie Chaplin and Mack Sennett’s the Keystone Cops, and with Una Stubbs leading Mack Sennett’s other group creation, The Bathing Beauties. As it happened, A Hard Days Night back in London was lampooning the Keystone Cops at exactly the same time.

The Valentino section on an exotic terrace is perhaps not enhanced by the ships and warehouses of Las Palmas harbour in the background.,

Cliff foreground with blue headband

We’re on to Erroll Flynn as a pirate (Captain Blood). It starts with Susan Hampshire tied to the mast, about to be ravaged by a pirate. Cliff fights his way through the dastardly band. The bit where he (Cliff) rescues her is a tad dubious. He starts to kiss her but fails to untie her and carries on kissing while she struggles.

Al Jolson’s blackface scene (by Cliff) in The Jazz Singer is one you might not dare to do today, as Justin Trudeau might tell you.

Gran Canaria houses work well as a South Western USA street. Richard O’Sullivan & Cliff Richard

As Edward announces that the movies had learned to talk, we see a Western scene where all we hear is gunshots.

If I Had A Talking Picture of You is sung by Cliff in mock Noel Coward voice to introduce the musical (Sunny Side Up, 1929). Edward tells us how musicals introduced beautiful women, and Cliff’s dancing partners are revealed to be the lads in drag. Hank Marvin keeps his trademark glasses on.

Melvyn Hayes previews his “Gloria” role from It Ain’t Half Hot Mum complete with large head dress.

Greta Garbo announces I Want To Be Alone in a beach tent, and the three Marx brothers (Cliff is Groucho) pile ito the tent with her. Another dubious implication!

Hank B. Marvin is Tarzan in specs.

That’s closely followed by Cliff as a singing cowboy. Gene Autrey in the Singing Cowboy from 1936. It could even be Roy Rogers or Hopalong Cassidy.

Cliff is Al Capone in Public Enemy Number One or Scarface. The Shadows are the other gang. They produce violin cases. Bruce has a Tommy gun, but the other three have atual violins.

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers are next.

Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson have a well-worn punch line. I won’t complain. I’ve used the same idea myself in stage shows. The “tent and stars” version is funnier. The Sherlock Holmes main series with Basil Rathbone ran 1939-46.

Shirley Temple in the Good Ship Lollipop, from Bright Eyes 1934

Civil War Drama? Gone With The Wind. That takes us to 1939.

The Marx brothers crash into a Hawaiian dance scene. Melvyn Hayes as Harpo

I guess it’s Casablanca with Cliff in a fez, and Susan back in her Greta Garbo raincoat and mode, but perhaps as Ingrid Bergmann. Not that they fit Casablanca apart from the raincoat and location.

There’s World War II, is that Betty Grable, famed for her legs, entertaining the troops? Again, pointing to Melvyn Hayes future in the It Ain’t Half Hot Mum concert party, though in this he’s a watching soldier.

It merges into Eroll Flynn in Objective Burma, with Cliff as Errol again.

Cliff is Julius Caesar invading Britain to represent the Epic in the 1950s.

I loved the next bit where our narrator intones that intellectuals started to watch foreign language films with subtitles … and what we see is our singing cowboy back again, but in Spanish with subtitles.

There’s a scene from West Side Story, complete with Jets jackets. Oddly both sides in the knife fight have them, and Susan Hampshire is Cliff’s opponent. Nice to see him with Move It era quiff again.

We have the Ursula Andress bikini scene from Dr No with Cliff as James Bond. It’s quite racy. The Keystone Cops appear as they’re in embrace on the beach. Cliff’s hand moves over her bare stomach to his trouser zip … which turns out to be a miniature gun and he shoots them.

The astonishing thing about the movie sequence is how long each very short scene must have taken to set up, with costume and make up.

Back to the film

After the sequence Jenny leaves the set, Thanks for the dream, she says. Bunty comes up with the idea of her rewriting the script as a musical, and filming secretly with a hidden camera. (Easier said than done in those days!) Johnnie says they shouldn’t tell Jenny what they’re doing. Jerry thinks they need a logo and company symbol.

Edward: How about an MGM lion, standing on a Paramount mountain, hitting a J. Arthur Rank gong with one of the Warner brothers?

We’re back on location with Johnnie back in his job as stunt double. As Lloyd shouts instructions to the legionnaires and Arabs in the scene, Look behind you? we move back to see Jerry and Edward filming behind the main camera. The “hidden camera” is pretty huge, but let’s suspend disbelief and say a couple of bits of grass conceal it.

In the next scene, the tea truck has the camera hidden in a Pepsi crate. I like the portable open reel recorder with 3.5 inch reels for sound. They film the next scene crouching in a tent.

It’s a fight between the Foreign Legion and Arabs. They watch it back in the viewing room, and Bunty points out it’s supposed to fit a song about friendship, not fighting. They view the film without sound and add in The Shadows soundtrack with Cliff’s voice. Fortunately a Welch-Marvin song. Actually it’s been re-filmed but I remember the Old GreyWhistle Test filmed cartoons a decade later where a musical soundtrack maes everything appear to synchronise.

They watch it back and move into What I’ve Gotta Do in the viewing room. Cliff gets to dance with Bunty (Una Stubbs), always his natural partner … and it’s said that romance blossomed while filming. The Shadows do well with the choreography too.

Back to the Lloyd Davis production, where Jenny is about to be burned at the stake. The shadows as the chamber quartet have drifted off to sleep. The lads are sill filming through their Pepsi box as Johnnie rescues her.

It’s all done with mirrors …but this is Furie showing off!

Bunty points out a problem. In her script Johnnie and Jenny have to dance in the Casbah café. So Johnnie is despatched to her dressing room to suggest that Jenny and he go to the café dressed in their film costumes, and ‘rehearse’ a scene for the next day. (I admired the double mirror shot in the dressing room).

They get to the restaurant where she’s hungry, but Johnnie suggests they rehearse the lines first. Bunty lures the maitre d’ to the bar with a slinky outfit and winks, while Jerry & Edward get rid of tablecloths and customers. The camera is concealed in a birthday cake. Johnnie has to claim it’s his birthday.

Johnnie: We really should start rehearsing you know. Let’s try it as a song.
Jenny: It’s not a musical.
Johnnie: Isn’t it? … No, it isn’t, but if we rehearse it as a song it might help the mood …

Cue: Do you remember? A Marvin-Welch song, thank goodness. The Shadows in fezs play behind a screen. It’s a duet. She has a sweet voice. They kiss in the script, then it turns into a real one.

Lloyd is furious over an interview Jenny has given to the press and ticks her off. Douglas suggests he be nicer to her.

Lloyd: Unless this picture’s a smash hit. I’m finished. Through! My last film.

He explains that he’s not been offered anything new in ten years.

Lloyd: A couple of old-fashioned pictures made it big. So they thought why not get an old-fashioned director. Me.

This is very knowing and self-referential dialogue from Myers-Cass.

Anyway, Lloyd remembers he left his script in the projection theatre. He gets to the door and overhears them planning how to use the same camera angles as him. The gang look up from their discussion and see Lloyd’s face in the projection window.

Lloyd threatens to fire them, as they’ve used his spare camera and his film (an aside on the cost of 35 mm stock!). Johnnie, convinces him not to. Lloyd smugly tells him that he will allow them to continue but not with any of his equipment.

Loyd: Now Mr Zanuck Jnr. Let’s see you finish your picture. Without film, without costumes.,without lights and without a camera.

Johnnie walks away (to lush romantic strings) but hears Jenny crying through a door. He goes in. She tells him she’s in trouble. She did an interview with “Miguel and his crazy movie camera” and it made just about every newsreel in London.

Johnnie races to meet the others with both bits of news. Miguel is on the set doing an interview with his camera! It’s apparently “crazy” because it’s a Spanish camera (more … to me it looks like Super 8!).

Johnnie: To get things done, you need all kinds of people!

Another telegraphed song cue … All Kinds of People. It’s a major dance production on the set. Una Stubbs dances with Cliff again.

Una Stubbs in white- definitely ‘lead dancer’ status and ability

We get a long instrumental break with more “beat jazz dance.” Una Stubbs is really, really good, that is she can work right in with the professional dancers on the difficult bits … she started her career as a dancer before adding acting. There’s a solo drum section too and the instrumental is again, a totally different and better piece of music to the frame song. Their signature … it goes back to finish with a couple of lines from the song.

The next film scene is Johnnie wrestling with a crocodile. Jenny is tied up yet again … let alone in the Movie History sequence, where she also gets tied up twice. They’re filming right behind Lloyd who keeps waving his fly switch in the camera lens without knowing it’s there. It ruins their shot. Edward has an idea for the re-shoot … The Wooden Horse, the prisoner of war movie where they dig a tunnel under a gymnastics “horse”. They put Miguel inside one. The Shadows jump over it while playing as the string quartet during filming.

In A Matter of Moments

We see Johnnie and Jenny having a quiet romantic chat out on the mountain. He won’t tell her what they’ve been doing. We move into In A Matter of Moments as they set off in a horse drawn carriage. We see how deeply unattractive that black Gran Canaria rock is too.

They worry about filming the finale without Jenny’s knowledge. The finale in Lloyd’s film was done before any of them had even arrived on the island. Johnnie suggests they finance filming the ending out of their own pockets. Trouble is, they’ll need Jenny in costume with the extras. The idea is that they put her on the call sheet and when she gets on set, they explain that Lloyd Davis is late as usual. They tell her it’s a rehearsal and shoot it.

They laugh that Johnnie has Jenny wrapped round his finger and can persuade her to do anything … the camera tracks back to reveal that Lloyd and Jenny are sitting at the next table listening to them. She burst into tears on Lloyd’s shoulder. We now discover that Lloyd is Jenny’s father and he hired her. In Hollywood they used to say The son-in-law Also Rises so here it’s The Daughter Also Rises. It has been a ‘deep dark secret,’

Lloyd tells her not to go to the set on the day.

The stand ins

They are filming the next day, using Jerry in drag, filmed from behind, as Jenny’s stand in. Melvyn Hayes really was rehearsing that future sitcom. I think John Rostill is standing in for Cliff.

Johnnie, finds Jenny at the swimming pool and begs her to help them, pointing out that the boys are paying the extras on set, and she agrees. Then says she never wants to see him again.

When filming is over, everyone feels down and depressed at the results. Johnnie and Jenny commiserate and declare they love each other. (I saw that coming!) Lloyd interrupts just as Johnnie starts, ‘I want to ask you something … how are you at picking out emeralds?’ Lloyd dismisses her from the room. He is equally disappointed that with his final cut:

Lloyd: You’ve used my equipment to run your film. By the way, how was it?
Johnnie: Terrible.
Lloyd: Terrible? Then I don’t mind. Matter of fact, I’ve just been running my film.
Johnnie: I suppose it was brilliant.
Lloyd: If I say so myself, the scenes were beautifully composed. The colours were magnificent. The spectacle gigantic.
Johnnie: But how was it?
Lloyd: Terrible.

They work out that Lloyd filmed the action scenes better, but Jenny was best in the secret musical. Lloyd suggests they combine their movies. The problem? Douglas is the lead in the main film. Johnnie is the lead in the musical.

Lloyd: Simple. We have two leads! You’re brothers!

We see the combination. They sing Youth and Experience together. (Hang on, won’t that be a new scene?)

It is shown at the movie premiere and the audience’s reception is enthusiastic. Lloyd brings Johnnie up on stage as his co-director, and whispers that he will also be his son-in-law. This is the first time Johnnie has heard that Lloyd is her father.

Cliff and Walter Slezak then duet on Youth and Experience. To represent this, one side of the audience has Chelsea Pensioners at the front. The other has sea cadets, army cadets, boy scouts and girl guides. This could also have been an easy way of filling a premiere theatre with large blocks of invited people, though as the ending is filmed there, they can’t have shown them the rest of the film … or maybe they did as the film on the screen ends with Douglas, Johnnie and Jenny running up a sand dune.

Musically, it’s really such an old style closing song. (I’d have gone for reprising On The Beach over the credits). The Chelsea Pensioners and the old side of the audience sing We don’t understand the younger generation verse. The scouts and guides sing We don’t understand the older generation. The gang walk down and join them in a theatrical sung curtain call. I guess they are STILL subverting the acting roles / actors behind the roles / celebrities / film / audience interface.

OVERALL

It was a major surprise to me, in that I think in some ways it’s very good indeed. I watched it through once, then wanted to watch again in sections to write the review, which is why this is so long. The cinematography and film direction is way above Cliff’s previous two. The costume designer deserves an award for quantity if not quality as well. The humour hovers precariously around Carry On level, though in Richard O’Sullivan and Melvyn Hayes they had discovered a natural sitcom duo. It needed to step a little further into more absurd comedy because it was approaching it. The much maligned plot is post-modern in that it subverts the medium so often by breaking behind the camera in the “film within a film” sequences, and the pastiche element is well-executed. I liked the plot concept actually in that it was not the cliché of the previous ones. I can see why The Shadows didn’t know what was going on, constantly changing costumes and being put into what seemed completely unrelated situations. That’s true for much of the cast in most films, and they had had limited set pieces in the earlier ones, while here they were a permanent fixture of the gang.

Susan Hampshire is a ‘proper actress’ in a different class to Cliff’s previous co-stars. Walter Slezak is excellent. However, the plot line where the apparent ‘baddie’ turns out to be the father of one of the leads, and is a nice guy in the end virtually mirrors The Young Ones. The difference here is that no one knows until the end, whereas in The Young Ones we, the audience, knew, but none of the characters in the story did.

The Stanley Black orchestration is a strong point in the movie sequences, especially when doing things like William Tell rather than the show songs.

Where its reputation fails is the original music, which for a musical is a serious problem. On The Beach is easily the best song in the film by a mile, yet somehow it lacks the ear-worm quality of The Young Ones, Summer Holiday or Bachelor Boy. Bruce Welch, with either Hank Marvin or Brian Bennett was an emerging talent as a writer and should have been given more songs.

The Myers-Cass musical pieces are the problem. Mired in the early 50s. When they’re pastiching, OK, but it’s dire stuff and wholly unoriginal. They let the film down.

The film lost out to A Hard Day’s Night ‘s zing and originality … and in the end, they were no competition to a Beatles vehicle where even the weakest songs were way, way better than anything here. Ironically, the zany script / exotic location / tons of costume changes aspect of Wonderful Life might have influenced Help!

SOUNDTRACK

An album, and three EPs.

The LP. A custom inner sleeve was unusual for EMI, but they had not listed the tracks on the rear cover. I liked the LP sleeve.

Wonderful Life (EP) August 1964 – all Welch / Marvin / Bennett compositions. Walkin’ is by The Shadows

Wonderful Life No 2 EP copy

Wonderful Life No. 2 (EP) October 1964. A Matter of Moments by Bruce Welch. The other three are all Myers-Cass compositions

Hits From Wonderful Life: EP, December 1964. On The Beach is Welch / Marvin / Richard. The other three are Myers-Cass and could not be described as hits even by their mums.

As with Summer Holiday a 2 LP set of the actual soundtrack versions was pressed by Elstree – only 150 copies for cast and crew. £700 if you can find one.

POP EXPLOITATION FILMS

The Young Ones (1962)
Play It Cool (1962)
Summer Holiday (1963)
What A Crazy World (1963)
Live It Up! (1963)
Just For You (1964)
Wonderful Life (1964)
A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
Gonks Go Beat (1965)
Help! (1965)