Made as a vehicle for the Dave Clark Five with the intent of capturing the success of the Beatles' Hard Days Night, this movie starts out looking like a surprisingly stylish knock off but turns out to be something very different; a melancholy and sometimes lyrical satire or mid-60s England.
The band plays stunt men working on an ad campaign with it girl Barbara Ferris. While Hard Days Night was an ensemble, this movie soon becomes a road picture of Dave and Barbara headed to a deserted island. In rock-movie style they do wacky things, but they also find themselves traveling past rusted war machines and hobnobbing with stoners.
It is very much a mid-60s English movie, generally reminiscent more of Richard Lesters' "The Knack and How to Get It" than his earlier "Hard Day's Night."
The relationship between Barbara and Dave is neatly expressed in an early scene where Barbara imagines Gatsby-like parties on the island while Dave considers what supplies they would need. She is about the journey, he is about the destination, and his matter-of-fact manner contrasts with Barbara's poetic nature (at one point she says a deserted hotel "smells like dead holidays."
The weakness of Catch Us If You Can is that it wavers between a surreal and satiric melancholy and the wacky burlesque of scenes like costume part that runs riot.
While this feels more like a real movie than a band vehicle - unlike Hard Day's Night, which for all it's brilliance was a fairly plotless excuse for a bunch of songs), the band vehicle moments come through, most notably in the insistence of keeping the rest of the band around without every establishing their characters.
While episodic and uneven in tone, the film should be considered a mid-60s counter-culture classic.
The band plays stunt men working on an ad campaign with it girl Barbara Ferris. While Hard Days Night was an ensemble, this movie soon becomes a road picture of Dave and Barbara headed to a deserted island. In rock-movie style they do wacky things, but they also find themselves traveling past rusted war machines and hobnobbing with stoners.
It is very much a mid-60s English movie, generally reminiscent more of Richard Lesters' "The Knack and How to Get It" than his earlier "Hard Day's Night."
The relationship between Barbara and Dave is neatly expressed in an early scene where Barbara imagines Gatsby-like parties on the island while Dave considers what supplies they would need. She is about the journey, he is about the destination, and his matter-of-fact manner contrasts with Barbara's poetic nature (at one point she says a deserted hotel "smells like dead holidays."
The weakness of Catch Us If You Can is that it wavers between a surreal and satiric melancholy and the wacky burlesque of scenes like costume part that runs riot.
While this feels more like a real movie than a band vehicle - unlike Hard Day's Night, which for all it's brilliance was a fairly plotless excuse for a bunch of songs), the band vehicle moments come through, most notably in the insistence of keeping the rest of the band around without every establishing their characters.
While episodic and uneven in tone, the film should be considered a mid-60s counter-culture classic.