In the heady days of the 1960s, they had this new-fangled thing called ‘music’. (Wait, wait, I’m going somewhere with this.) Before then, everyone just sat around in silence all day, waiting for… I don’t know, The Archers to come on? Music having not been invented, they had to listen for it; they couldn’t just hear the theme tune to know it was time to switch off the radio after all. But with the invention of music, by which I of course mean the stealing of it from people of colour but now white people are doing it so it’s socially acceptable, suddenly everyone wanted a piece of that pie. More seriously though, with the success of the Beatles, United Artists quickly crapped out a cheap film for bonus money (yeah, yeah, A Hard Day’s Night (1964) is deemed a classic and all that, but it doesn’t really change that it was knocked out quickly on a tight budget because UA wanted to sell the soundtrack album, ideally before EMI got around to issuing the material stateside, to capitalise on this surely short-lived fad while they could; any artistic merit was, from their perspective, pretty much immaterial). It did quite well, would you believe? And so inevitably came attempts to replicate its success.

And so, to that end, Catch Us If You Can, which is a vehicle for The Dave Clark Five, supposedly one of the Beatles’ biggest rival groups. You could be forgiven for being unaware of that bit of alleged history; the eponymous Clark owns the rights to the band’s recordings and has historically been rather tight-fisted with regards to licensing them, so god knows I haven’t heard much beyond what’s in this film. Anyway, to be fair, the pop star vehicle film didn’t really begin with A Hard Day’s Night; obviously there are the myriad Cliff Richard films from the early ‘60s that exist for our sins (though there are things that predate those even), and on a surface level Catch Us If You Can probably has more in common with those than with the Beatles’ film. While that presents itself as a day in the life of the band, this has no such pretensions; old man Clark ain’t playin’ himself here (oh, and nor are the rest of the group, but they’re not really important here… much like the name of the band implies… Hmm…).

The film follows the escapades of Steve (Clark) and Dinah (Barbara Ferris), also the other four members of the Dave Clark Five crop up but no one cares about them; one of them doesn’t even get any lines. Dinah is the hot new face of the meat marketing board. You see, what you do is you get a pretty girl and then add slogans that are all like ‘aw, yeah, meat’. This was seemingly the height of commentary in the mid ‘60s, or mid ‘60s cinema at any rate; this is far from the only film of the period that I’ve seen that pulls the ‘models=meat’ card with a level of subtlety usually reserved for sledgehammers. Increasingly unhappy with the worlds of modelling and advertising and all that, she absconds with a stuntman in the middle of filming an ad (yes, a stuntman, because these people are serious about making meat seem exciting to the young peeps) to go on a spree of vandalising posters throughout the city before fleeing to the country in search of a eutopia.

Yeah, I’m spelling it with an ‘e’. Bite me.

Anyway, their taskmasters are in pursuit, and the quest itself may not be quite what it seems. You might have noticed, by the way, that that description focuses more on Ferris’ character. Despite the idea being ‘Dave Clark (…and the others, I guess) in a film’, one could argue quite effectively that hers is the actual main character rather than the morose Steve. Both characters however enjoy an exciting journey in disillusionment. Nobody knows Steve, even people he’s met; everybody knows Dinah, even people she hasn’t met (albeit as the meat girl). It tears them up inside. Despite being a pop music film, the whole thing has a pervasive air of melancholy and bleakness. The film’s sense of whimsy is decidedly unwhimsical. The central quest is based on a romantic idea, but the film is too cynical as a rule to take it at face value; even as the pair leave London, they invariably stumble on people just as miserable, struggling through life with as much or more difficulty than either of them are having. Even if they reach their goal will it change anything? It’s likely moot; their goal is illusory. There is no paradise waiting for them at the end of the road trip. It’s all just more of the same.

So, yeah, that’s a bit heavy for a film whose main target audience was presumably teenage girls. Oh, well, they’ve got to learn that life sucks eventually, right? It’s all very peculiar, though not entirely off-brand for Anglo Amalgamated. While they were the British company with the greatest trade in exploitation flicks (and Carry On films, they were responsible for a load of those), they also tended to gamble on new talent as well as more unusual fair, and I suppose if there was an overlap in those categories, more so the better. To that end, people who read the credits overview at the top of this will notice that this here film was directed by John Boorman; yes, he of Deliverance (1972) and Zardoz (1973) infamy; and written by Peter Nichols, soon to be of A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1967)* and a man that I’ve seen described in an obituary as ‘Britain’s gloomiest playwright’ or words to that effect. This was the first theatrical feature for the both of them. It was also almost certainly the correct move. Boorman’s stylish direction and Nichols’ melancholic script help elevate the film beyond simply an ‘us too’ effort for a largely uninteresting band, both musically and in terms of screen presence (and probably acting ability; while the Beatles weren’t great, the scenes where the bulk of the DC5 do get to show off their skills seems to hint at why most of them didn’t get much to do), making something that, akin to the later Monkees vehicle Head (1968), functions more as a critique of the commodification of youth.

* The original play, that is. A film, with Nichols adapting the script himself, was released in 1972.