A wry look at the Swinging London phenomenon, penned by jazz musician and cultural critic George Melly, Smashing Time has been not entirely fairly (which is also to say ‘not entirely unfairly’) derided as 'Carry On Swinging London'. Arriving as it did pretty much as that bubble burst, it was a resounding flop on release. It’s not exactly hard to see why. Around the time that Rita Tushingham was running through an art gallery trying to avoid a (non-humanoid-thank-you-very-much) robot that’s trying to kiss her because *shrug*, my notes include the line ‘who is this for?’

The answer is me, frankly. Whenever I ponder that, something like nine times out of ten that is the answer.

Northern lasses Brenda and Yvonne (Rita Tushingham and Lynn Redgrave, respectively), ostensibly best friends but in that weirdly girly sense where there’s a vast amount of resentment and disdain for each other that could generously be described as ‘bubbling under’, arrive in London, the latter with big bloody dreams of stardom as part of the smart set, the former just dragged along for ride by her overbearing ‘friend’. Naturally they’re robbed of all their savings (Twenty-three whole pounds!), less ten shillings, pretty much instantly, as they find out upon trying to pay for breakfast. Yvonne, invariable winner in their attempts to subsume each other’s egos, greatly overestimates her ability to make it in Swinging London, being pretty much devoid of talent or style; her idea of the trendy It-girl coming from magazines that are out of date by the time they hit the press, much less the stands; but is nonetheless convinced just strutting down Carnaby Street will net her a lucrative modelling contract, while leaving Brenda to work off the debt. It perhaps pays off; trendy photographer Tom Wabe (Michael York, sporting a Cockney accent which often borders on Dick Van Dyke proportions)† spots her and pays a cool fiver for a snap. In need of a place to live, Yvonne finds an ad by a ‘showbiz’ woman who’s looking for two female roommates in a similar profession. Despite Brenda pointing out they’re not, Yvonne just gives her a pound and flings her at a second-hand clothes shop to go sort out her image, while she goes off to secure the room. Their new housemate is perfectly willing not only to let them stay, but also to set them up with jobs… at the hostess club she works at. It’s glamourous enough for Yvonne. Meanwhile, Brenda returning from the shop stumbles upon, quite literally, the late edition which features Yvonne’s photo as an example of what not to wear. She resolves not to tell her, but does decide to go and give the photographer what for. It seems however that she has accidentally stumbled upon an actual fashionable look however, and soon catches his eye.

Well, I certainly made that sound like it has more of a narrative than it actually has. In actuality, it kind of meanders along as the ladies find themselves in a sequence of comedy set pieces that aren’t necessarily bridged together all that strongly, instead having the loose association of, for instance, an episode of Python. There is a certain logic to how the plot gets from one place to the next, but it’s not in any typically structured fashion. At the same time, there does indeed seem to be a method to this madness. The film is patterned after, and directly alludes to, Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. Alice in Wonderland had rather a renewed cultural nous in the ‘60s; part of this presumably being down to the recent centenary of the novel’s publication. That particular fact might be incidental, but the not-so-subtle naming scheme of the characters whom the (let’s call them) heroines encounter suggests very much that the structure of the film, such as it is, is a deliberate link to Carroll’s work.

I suppose the ‘Jabberwocky’ theme naming is perhaps more subtle than it could have been. And it’s not as if anyone really maps directly onto Carroll’s characters beyond, I guess, Brenda and Yvonne playing essentially the Alice roles, different interpretations thereof; the flaky Yvonne this enthusiastic, game-for-anything Alice seen in a lot of adaptations, and the morose Brenda the more cynical and bemused by what she encounters vision that more reflects the character in Tenniel’s artwork (and the interpretation seen in Jonathan Miller’s 1966 TV film, which is still probably the gold standard for filmic adaptations of the novel). On that note, Miller reportedly viewed the book as akin to a child’s interpretation of the world of adults; Alice encounters an array of figures dealing with seemingly illogical tasks of no apparent consequence like they’re the most important things in the world and seem eager that she should do the same. Smashing Time works on a somewhat similar level, with a fundamental absurdity to what the girls encounter; for instance, Brenda gets a job at an upscale boutique and successfully sells just about all the stock when she insists that if people want to hang out then they have to buy something, only for her boss to be disappointed because if they actually sold their stock, then why would people actually come to the shop? (There’s also perhaps that the film’s finale takes place at the revolving restaurant in the Post Office Tower, the country’s sometime most flagrantly obvious national secret.)

Yvonne’s ready and willing acceptance of all that she encounters, no matter how preposterous, is her hamartia, leading to her inevitable exploitation by marketers; the inevitable irony is that it’s the dowdy seeming Brenda, more skeptical of that which she comes across, who becomes a natural star amongst her friend’s target audience quite by accident. A throughline is an art vs commerce argument; Yvonne spends a lot of money to become a 6d shop Cilla Black (so better than actual Cilla [laugh track]), a manufactured idol with no notable talent but a lot of marketing clout.

Pop has imposed the idea of instant success based on the promotion of a personal style rather than a search for content or meaning. Most damagingly, even on its own terms, pop is in many ways an ersatz culture feeding off its own publicity and interested to an obsessive extent with its own image reflected in the looking-glass world of the mass media.

Melly, in Huisman, 61

I was actually kind of surprised at finding some big essays on this film while researching it. It doesn’t seem to have ever actually been released on video in the UK; the BBFC only lists a rating from its original release. Still, it makes a certain degree of sense; it does, as Robert Murphy points out (Huisman, 49), have a certain infamy as the film that killed poppy Swinging London type films. Such a reputation probably isn’t really deserved; the dying days of the era are somewhat baked into the film, with Yvonne’s hopelessly out-of-date idea of what’s on trend. Melly himself reportedly wrote that by 1966, the in crowd wouldn’t have been seen dead on Carnaby Street (Winship); the film’s failure to live up to fashion almost seems like the point. 

In fact, my appreciation for the film was probably boosted by these essays, doing as they do the heavy lifting as to what George Melly’s deal was for me. I did enjoy it; as I suggested earlier, this kind of bizarre mess is like catnip to me; but I did ponder whether there was supposed to be some kind of finger-wagging tut-tutting element to its approach of the scene. It’s a film about two northern girls who go to London for a ‘smashing time’ (eh, eh), have bizarre and confusing encounters with the trendy people they long to be a part of, are invariably taken advantage of, and then decide they’ve had enough and go home. This seemingly reactionary line probably didn’t help the film’s perception with younger audiences, and probably didn’t do much to prevent the ‘Carry On Swinging London’ epithet either (the overall conservatism of Carry On’s worldview (and, perhaps more to the point that, of its producer), in spite of its ostensible bawdiness, were quite well established), though really Smashing Time even at its sex-farciest (there’s a sequence where Yvonne is picked up at the hostess club and Brenda endeavours to protect her honour) never really feels much like a Carry On film in terms of its sense of humour; while I suppose the common element is in them both featuring slapstick, it never really engages in the old-time saucy postcard sexuality of Carry On (in fact, it often seems to very deliberately try and avoid it). 

The film is less of a stodgy ARGLE BARGLE YOUNG’UNS piece than it appears, as it seems Melly was genuinely interested in the cultural milieu and was more put out by the cynical marketing side of youth culture than the actual artistry of it. Indeed, the film seems to hold in its greatest ire for the sorts of people who are greatest removed from the scene but that exploit it anyway; the business men who see the bandwagon as easy money, or the lecherous old men who see young women as an easy lay. For all the absurdity of youth culture, the more understandable establishment figures seem to provide a far greater threat.

† In the context of this film, it sort of works, as the falsity of appearance is a recurring motif. Beyond fashions, there’s a running element of people being revealed to be wearing wigs and prostheses and such, and an elaborate double inverted snobbery, such as when Yvonne is encouraged to tell people she used to work at t’mill rather than at a record shop to increase her supposed credibility. It would follow that Wabe would exaggerate his supposed working-class credentials. This interpretation is perhaps incidental, as apparently York does the exact same accent in The Guru (1969) which doesn’t seem like it’s aiming for anything of the sort. As an aside, he stars opposite Rita Tushingham, surprisingly cast against type as the kind of fashionable crisp voweled posho she comes up against in this film.