User reviews

This movie could have been SO much better with less Dave Clark. Apparently Mr Clark was the Master of the Universe with all things DC5. He cast himself as one of the two leads in this movie and it suffers because of him.

He can't act, he speaks monotonously, his demeanor is dour and completely un-interesting. The young lady in the movie is good and so are the other members of the band.

Mike Smith has charisma and it shows. Rick Huxley is funny. He shows a natural talent for goofing at the right time. Unfortunately these two are not allowed to have larger parts in the film.

The script is ok. It's worth watching for the mid-sixties snapshot it presents.

But Dave Clark? Yeesh!

This follows the footsteps of The Beatles who released A Hard Day's Night a year earlier. This is The Dave Clark 5 having a wild weekend. As early rivals of the Beatles, they are not as charismatic or as successful. As a rock band, they had a good run but can't compare with the cultural earthquake of The Beatles. Few can.

The plot of this is relatively uninspired but that's not the real issue. The guys live together in a flat. Dinah is tired of her shooting a meat commercial and runs away with Steve (Dave Clark) who steals the Jaguar from the lot. They have a crazy adventure.

At the end of the day, Dave Clark is not a big enough personality. I'm not sure if he's even happy to be there. At least, the other guys are trying to be funny. The girl is pretty with good energy. The Beatles were having fun with the camera. Dave's not having fun with the material. This is a fascinating music time capsule and an intriguing comparison study between one icon and one also-ran.

I've got to admit that I resisted John Boorman's first film, an effort to replicate the success of The Beatles' A Hard Days Night by fellow British Invasion band the Dave Clark Five. It was hard to figure out what was even going on with five, young British men that all kind of looked alike and, separated by almost sixty years from their celebrity, difficult to differentiate. However, the movie does gain a focus as it goes, and it's a surprisingly intelligent and sad one at that. I wonder if part of the issue is a reported creative tug of war between Boorman and his main star Dave Clark who was trying to use the film as something of a star vehicle for himself.

Steve (Clark) is the lead of five stuntmen working on a series of ads for meat also starring Dinah (Barbara Ferris), an ad campaign developed by Leon (David de Keyser) back at the office while Steve, Dinah, and the other four members of the band, I mean, stunt team, work on a commercial at a meat packing plant. Steve gets too sick of it all and, in between shots with Dinah along with him in the great looking Jaguar from the production, decides to just abscond. If what follows wasn't inspired by Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, I'll eat my shoe, for what follows is a largely aimless series of events as Steven and Dinah escape their jobs, London, and their lives.

However, I'll get some crap for this, I think Boorman does Breathless better than Godard did. I'm not going to go in to why I've never, ever been able to get into Breathless, but I do end up getting into Boorman's take much more than Godard's.

The journey that Steve and Dinah takes is a journey into something like dreams. Not the dreams of the night but the dreams of the day. They are both out to discover the literal location of Burgh Island, a vacation spot in the middle of winter. To get there, they keep to the side roads and encounter Beatniks in an abandoned south English town and getting a ride from a married couple Guy (Robin Bailey) and Nan (Yootha Joyce). It was at the couple's house where I discovered my first sense of the warring creative senses, and it all has to do with a scene between Dinah and Guy. It's obvious that both Guy and Nan are trying to have sex with their visitors, while the couple teases the other at their lack of success as they also feign jealousy of each other's attempts, Guy brings Dinah up to his collection of old movie stuff, what he calls the pop history of the world, and the two speak of the effervescent nature of memory and life. This is also around the point where Leon, at his office in London, looks at a series of projected images of Dinah in a framing that recalls Bergman's Persona, though this came out a year prior to Bergman's film (did Boorman inspire Bergman?!). There's something really intelligent going on under the surface here, and it just comes more to the surface as the film goes on.

The rest of the Dave Clark Five join them for a costume party. At the party, with the ad agency's men on their tail in order to capture the end of Dinah's run for promotion purposes, the movie becomes more in line with a knockoff of A Hard Day's Night with everyone dressing as movie characters (including a couple of Marx Brothers) while antics go on as the five and Dinah escape. Steve and Dinah break off and go straight to Burgh Island, and the finale is a weirdly dreamy, ironic, and even somewhat touching ending to this strange little weekend. It's there that they discover, on this abandoned vacation spot that will only reopen after winter, that they've been allowed to run around in order to help promote the meat campaign, creating a feeling of artificiality about the journey, matched visually by this island which, when the tide is low, actually connects to the land by a sandbar. It's not an island, and they were never really quite free. How much of what they felt as they discovered beatniks, ran from the British military (it's a strange little episode), fled from paparazzi, and generally just ran around the southern countryside of England was actually real?

For a film that was obviously marketed as just another zany little adventure for some British invasion pop band that seems to have been completely forgotten by the culture in the decades since, that's a surprisingly sedate and pensive note to end things on.

As the film progressed, I saw these flashes of cinematic influence and a take on freedom in a controlled culture (specifically show business, but it could extend out from there generally) that actually showed the film had a fair bit on its mind beyond silly antics. The silly antic stuff is fine, but it feels a bit lazy and not all that well thought out, like Boorman and Clark just set up the cameras and waited for magic to happen. The lack of clarity around the opening as well is something of a frustration, but once this film settles down, it becomes quite compelling. I would assume that Boorman had more responsibility for the scenes that captured my attention more because Clark is generally not in them save the ending, so this feels like a really interesting place for the nascent feature film director, fresh from a starting point in British television, to start.

The Dave Clark Five are certainly no match for the Beatles, but this film is easily worthy of comparison with A Hard Day's Night and Help! A lot of the credit must go to director John Boorman (giving a taste of the visual pyrotechnics he later unleashed in Point Blank), and to the surprisingly melancholy screenplay by Peter Nichols. (Georgy Girl, Privates on Parade)

Two young people, a stuntman (Dave Clark) and a model (Barbara Ferris), go AWOL from a commercial shoot and embark on a trip across England. But their jaunt isn't all larky fun. They bicker and quarrel, they encounter a self-consciously hip and desperately unhappy married couple; they find that their exploits have been incorporated into the glitzy ad campaign they were trying to escape from in the first place.

A fun little rock and roll film that makes dark observations about the impermanence of youthful exuberance, the futility of youthful rebellion, and the commodification of youth culture. Overall, the tone is more in keeping with the manic depressive grunge rock aesthetic than with the go-Go-GO madcap vibe of other youth films of the 60s.

I was surprised in a positive way. In judging a 60s British pop film it's only fair to look beyond the Beatles at the wider canon and it contains some proper turkeys, stiff, cliched and beyond banal. Occasionally though filmmakers at least tried to be interesting and off-the-wall and this is one of those occasions. It doesn't always work and it's a bit flat in places but it definitely has its moments. The segment with the proto-hippies (or evolving beatniks) is particularly fascinating as a snapshot of a cultural undercurrent entering the mainstream consciousness. As with all films part of its appeal is in what, even unwittingly, the film shows us of the period in which it was made. As other reviewers have noted in that respect there are some revealing shots of of some very bemused members of the public in what is presumably London, all grey and very unSwinging. So not great but well worth sitting through.

John Boorman in his first outing as a director, he does a reasonable job of capturing the media and fashion scene in 1965. He also presents some great shots of the handsome, iconic locations in London, Bath and then Devon. Filmgoers can clearly see the similarities of this film, with Dick Lester's Beatles 1964 film, 'Hard Days Night' by the frantic scurrying around by Dave and his group in an attempt to give the film energy. Nevertheless, under Boorman's direction the film has pace and tempo, hence never allowing scenes to drag. However, like all films with pop singers and groups, the acting is substandard. The problem for Boorman was to have the group hanging around locations while in the background, Dave Clark as Steve, is grabbing all the action as well as the beautiful model, played by Barbara Ferris. At times I felt sorry for them, as they were never more than shadows, gawping at Dave as he had all the lines. The storyline is thin and lacks sparkle. Ferris comes across as a bit of an airhead model and Dave Clark, as Steve, looks sullen, moody and plain miserable for most of the time. His acting is rather wooden and as he had the lead role, watching the film is heavy going. With a dull and melancholy storyline, I found the whole thing uninspiring and pretentious.

British rock band the Dave Clark Five gets to do its own version of A Hard Day's Night with Having A Wild Weekend. The film is replete with many of their well known hits of the day just as the Beatles' classic.

Front man Dave Clark works as a stuntman and the other members of the group are his flat mates. They have quite a pad too. While working on a commercial model Barbara Ferris who has become the British symbol via the ad campaign for meat just gets tired of it and she and Clark decide to just split for a bit.

Nothing more to tell other than this was the first feature film directed by John Boorman who would go on to do many more hit films including a favorite of mine Zardoz.

Fans of the group you will love this as much as Fab Four fans love A Hard Day's Night.

I first saw Having a Wild Weekend back when it first came out over 50 years ago, and again today for the second time. Even though I was a Beatles-obsessed pre-teen from the first time I saw them on the Ed Sullivan Show in Feb. 1964, and dragged my parents to take me to see A Hard Days Night when it came out the same year, I still liked other groups of that era including DC5. I bought their album HAWW with my allowance money when it came out.

But I'll never sit through this 'movie' again, ever. It's a blatant rip-off of AHDN but nowhere near as good, endearing, or enjoyable. It's more like one overly-long music video, which of course hadn't been invented yet.

Dave Clark as the lead 'actor' had maybe 5 lines total and was more wooden than a cigar store Indian statue, never showing the least bit of emotion about anything. Barbara Ferris as Dinah was blah - vapid and wishy-washy at best. The only reason I gave it more than one star was because of the moody black and white 1960s England cinematography and a few of the DC5 songs that still sound pretty good even though they're a half-century old.

As for the underlying deeper-meaning theme that other reviewers mention here, it was only hinted at and never fleshed out enough to be more than meaningless blips on the radar screen of the annoyingly endless, mindless, shallow, silly romp that was the major part of the movie; that culminated in exactly zero/zilch/nothing at the end. Meh.

2 out of 10 / Grade D-

I'd heard a lot about this film before I ever had the chance to see it. I was predisposed to be dismissive.

However, when I finally DID see it, I was taken quite aback.

The director, John Boorman, is very negative about this film in his recent autobiography. I must disagree. There is a lazy school of thought that sees this movie as a straight rip-off of "A Hard Day's Night". Again, I dissent.

When I sat down to watch this film I expected something approximating to the stock descriptions: derivative, formulaic, just going through the motions.

I was quite unprepared for the reality of "Catch Us If You Can", which is a far more challenging and rule-breaking movie than its reputation would suggest. (I can only suppose that some people see what they expect to see.)

It surprised me that a vehicle for a pop band should be so downbeat and thought-provoking. Another IMDb reviewer rightly drew attention to the wintriness of this film.

There are two vital encounters in the film, once Steve (Dave Clark) and Dinah (Barbara Ferris) have fled from the TV commercial they are meant to be filming. The first is with a collection of hippie-esque drop-outs hiding out in rural ruins, the second with a middle-aged couple in a large townhouse in the affluent spa-town of Bath.

Their moves are monitored at a remove by a sinister advertising man, Leon Zissell, who seems to have a Svengali-like preoccupation with Dinah. To this end he dispatches two henchmen to pursue the errant couple. The elder of the two (not THAT old, as somebody remarks - probably in his mid-30s) is loyal, but at a fancy dress party in Bath his younger colleague readily succumbs to the charms of a pretty young lady.

I could try to encapsulate the plot of this film, but what matters far more is its atmosphere. Steve and Dinah are travelling (initially in a stolen E-Type Jag) towards an island off England's Devon coast that Dinah - young and successful - is contemplating buying. (This island conceit must be a straight lift from "La Dolce Vita", where the actress Marcello Mastroianni's character is "servicing", dreams of buying just such an island.)

The soundtrack is surpisingly strong. There are some straightforward songs from the Dave Clark Five, but otherwise they strive to provide something less stamped with the band style.

Like one of the other IMDb reviewers, I would have to agree, having seen this film, that it is actually stronger, viewed simply as a film, than "A Hard Day's Night". (Where it obviously falls down is the fact that its soundtrack - excellent as it actually is - is NOT by The Beatles.)

Don't patronise this movie, or damn it with faint praise. Don't condemn it for not being what it isn't (a Beatles film), but rejoice in the boldness of its departure from the Cliff-Beatles formula.

The scene in Bath with Robin Bailey and Yootha Joyce is worth the price of admission alone!

It is likely that the laudatory reviews are not unconnected with the fact that this was the first film of director John Boorman.Anyway apart from the fact that this is a rip off of a Hard Days Night the film suffers from the presence of Dave Clark who has the charm and emotional range of a speak your weight machine.This film is strictly for fans.

John Boorman's first feature, obviously thrown together as a cash in on "A Hard Day's Night"; shows his skill and promise as a director from the

get go. Dave Clark (of the Dave Clark Five) and a model who could be the girl George Harrison dismisses in the agent's office in "Hard Day's Night; take off on a holiday weekend across England as her obsessive manager trys to hunt her down.

In a series of scenes that seem halfway improvised, they run into aimless young people, uptight middle class folks, and others. The movie goes out of it's way to portray these people as, well, people and not "types", i.e. mods or rockers, hips or squares. There is a silly romp section around the roman baths at Bath.

The Dave Clark Five, the reason for the whole movie, are kept in the background even more than the Spencer Davis Group in "The Ghost Goes Gear." Only three songs are heard, but they're not bad. An interesting neither fish nor fowl entry, should be seen by British Invasion fans or fans of Boorman( I'm both).

Reading the other reviews is like a visit to Private Eye's Pseud's Corner. Come On. As someone who lived through 60s London I can't believe all the hype and drivel spoken about this poorly constructed movie. It's cheap and nasty. The sound is appalling, and yes, despite the other protestations to the contrary, it's merely a poor rip-off of Hard Days Night. It has no style, no panache and sweeping shots of London Traffic Signs is hardly art. Not even worth seeing it through. I thought "Mrs Brown YOu've Got a lovely Daughter" was dire. This is even worse. If it was supposed to be a witty look at the Swinging 60s then it failed miserably. If it was supposed to be avant garden, then who was the intended audience? I'm finding it hard to find anything more to share about this movie. I certainly wouldn't waste any money renting this piece of drivel. We caught it on TV and rather wished we'd not bothered. Save your time. Watch something else

I must say some of the Dave Clark Five songs are decent, but other than that being the one single redeeming feature of this boring film I would recommend ignoring this film all together, The alternate film title was "Having a Wild Weekend" but trust me, the dialogue is as wild as watching a snail crawl across a wet road. It's very slow, and not wild at all.

I give the film a less than worth watching 3 out of 10 IMDB rating.

Following the Beatles example, it was inevitable that other successful British Invasion bands would climb aboard the movie bandwagon. For a time, both here and in the States, the Dave Clark Five were probably the next most popular group of the day and were natural candidates for the big-screen. Like the Beatles, the direction gig was given to a young, up-and-coming director who would go on to greater things, in this case John Boorman, who boldly avoids the cheap cash-in route to instead come up with an ambitious, rather odd, individualistic road movie commenting as it goes on the generation gap, the price of fame and ultimately conformity (or not) with the expectations of society.

The film starts with a similar scene to one later used in "Help!" with the group living together in one big place, although one noticeably less salubrious than the posh pad the Beatles inhabit and also coincidentally shares with it another location, namely Salisbury Plain where again the army are on manoeuvres. But there the resemblance ends as Boorman undertakes, literally a very different journey with his film.

Band-leader Clark, besides being about the only good-looking guy in the group gets the main gig here as Steve who runs away with advertising "It Girl" Barbara Ferris's Dinah, ostensibly for her to buy an island retreat (ironically, something the Beatles also considered doing themselves, a few years later). With the rest of the group in often Keystone Cops-type pursuit, along with the national press pursuing a trumped-up kidnap story by Ferris's manager, we see Clark and Ferris hitch up with a bunch of nihilistic beatniks on the Plain actively passing round joints, then get taken in hand by the odd, slightly sinister middle-aged couple of Robin Bailey and a pre-Mildred Yootha Joyce who seem keen to get the attractive young couple bathed and disrobed as a prelude to who knows what. The rest of the group here catches up with them and they all dress up for a fancy-dress ball with Mike Smith making an especially unbecoming Jean Harlow.

The climax takes place at the island which turns out not to be the panacea the couple were hoping for leaving them to make their own individual decisions to accept or reject their respective confining day-jobs.

Like I said, this was a strange, off-beat affair and while I admire Boorman's own act of rebellion in not rushing to direct a cheap movie exploiting the group's fame, it ultimately failed to take me far down the road with it. There's no chemistry between Clark and Ferris, and the former, for all his pearly-white, saturnine good-looks never seems comfortable with his lines. His band-mates seem to be in a different movie altogether and can act even less than their leader. As for the music, the bright, successful title-song apart, it's similarly nondescript.

The film wants to be hip and happening in the way that other contemporary "youth" films like "The Knack, And How To Use It" or "Darling" also tried to be but, saddled with its pop-group cast, (there is noticeably no staged group musical performance anywhere in the film) one suspects that Boorman would rather the group wasn't in the film at all. In the end, I found it too lightweight and disjointed to really capture my attention far less hold it for its running-time, more "Bits and Pieces" than "Glad All Over", I guess you'd have to say.

Apparently, Dave Clark was jealous of The Beatles - both in regard to their music, as well as movies. And while his band, "The Dave Clark 5" (Five), had big hits (particularly here in the U. S., since they were part of "The British Invasion" in '64), ALOT of those hits sounded just like The Beatles, courtesy of lead singer/keyboardist Mike Smith (who was somewhat "a dead ringer" for Paul McCartney - both in looks & vocals). And that brings us to this band's only feature film outing, "Catch Us If You Can".

When Warner Bros. Picked up distribution rights for here (the U. S.), apparently it was done so "sight unseen" at first. After viewing what they bought, the studio then realized they had "a stinker" on their hands.

So first on the agenda - change the film's title to "Having A Wild Weekend".

And then fly the band here to make special appearances at a few movie theatres in New York & maybe other U. S. cities.

Despite these things, the film was a "bomb" at the box office, it didn't last more than a week - maybe 2 if it was lucky in certain areas.

Part of the problem with this film is that it can't make up its mind on whether it should be a comedy or a drama.

As a comedy, it's not very humorous, and as a drama, forget it. Yes - there are some comparisons to "A Hard Day's Night", but instead of pointing these out, I'll just say this - Dave Clark, in the musician/drummer-turned-actor "sweepstakes", is no Ringo Starr (or George Harrison, or John Lennon for that matter). There's no chemistry between him & "it girl" Barbara Ferris. And at the end of the movie, when these 2 finally get 'round to sharing a kiss, it's more of a anti-climax. When The Beatles did their second movie, "Help!", John Lennon would later say that he felt the band were "supporting players" in that one - the same can be said in regards to the other members of the 5.

To sum things up - "A Hard Day's Night" is a classic musical comedy, while "Catch Us If You Can"/"Having A Wild Weekend" might be worth a look.

BUT compared The Beatles' debut film, a total let down.

Let me put it another way - the 5's only movie is somewhat noteworthy as being the directorial debut of John Boorman. While he's known for some interesting films, he was also known for directing one of the worst sequels ever made - "Exorcist II: The Heretic". With that said, that film is far more interesting & entertaining than "Catch Us If You Can"/"Having A Wild Weekend".

At last a new film genre--'pop film noir'!.The whole film is so downbeat its untrue-Dave Clark is incredibly negative,downbeat & generally 'fed-up' throughout, thats its remarkable that it got released at all,considering its niche-i.e. 60's pop music cash-in.Dave's performance is brilliant conveying a media star rebelling against the media web,overshadowing Barbara Ferris excellent portrayal as a woman who succumbs to the media bullshit.The end scene is achingly sad as Dave & the band drive off across the beach leaving her to accept being engulfed by the media throng.Considering that the film is 40 years old it holds up very well.

Dull to the point of catatonia. It does, however, answer the question, Why did the DC5 never rise to the level of The Kinks, let alone The Beatles? As for its director, he does a good job of not tipping off his future talent. D plus.

I remember what a big deal the city of Kenosha made when "A Hard Day's Night" played at the Orpheum downtown theater. "Having a Wild Weekend," on the hand, blew through the area before I had a chance to see it. I think I have watched the movie from start to finish maybe four times in forty years. I like the film but it's no "A Hard Days Night."

1) The Beatles were far superior to the Dave Clark Five musically by the time the two movies were released.

2) Ringo as a leading character is vastly more enjoyable than Dave Clark's moody Steve. 3) The Beatles played their film for comedy while the Dave Clark Five went for mood.

4) The 4 Beatles had distinctive characters while the Dave Clark Five had one leading man and 4 bland supporting actors.

5) A hard day's Night moves rapidly while "Having A Wild Weekend" drags much of the time.

However, I still like "Having a Wild Weekend." Dinah was a cute little number and Steve had James Bond-like qualities. The costume party scene was a rave. The hippies being rounded up by the British army was a foreshadowing of the near future.

I saw this film in 1965 at a cinema in London when I was almost 16 years old. I always liked the Dave Clarke Five and for a time it looked like they may topple the Beatles as Britains top group. However, the reason this film always sticks in my mind is because I fell head over heels for the leading lady Barbara Ferris. She was the first of only three actresses in all my years of watching movies that I thought I was in love with. Yes my first teenage crush!! The film starts with the theme song CATCH US IF YOU CAN and off we go with Steve a stuntman (Dave) and Dinah a model(Barbara)absconding around London in an E-type Jaguar. There are some great 1960's scenes of London which transports me back in time bringing back memories. Anyway, out of London they mix with some hippies then meet a middle aged couple who live in Bath and eventually end up in Devon. All the time being chased by the rest of DC5 and also by some advertising executives henchmen. This is not a fully lighthearted movie as it has some sombre moments which makes it a little different from the usual pop group films. My favourite scene is when Dave and Barabara are walking and frolicking in the snow (lucky fella)with the haunting love song 'WHEN' being played in the background. Great stuff!!!

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.

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.