Having a Wild Weekend

Released Aug 18, 1965

1h 31m

Musical

Comedy

List

80%

5 Reviews

Tomatometer

50%

100+ Ratings

Audience Score

British TV stuntmen (Barbara Ferris) hit the road with a bored actress (David Lodge), whose manager (Lenny Davidson) reports her kidnapped.

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Peter Bradshaw

Guardian

Like the early movies of Godard, it is obsessed with the language of publicity: advertising, magazines, the mass media.

Rated: 3/5

Apr 1, 2021

Full Review

Pauline Kael

McCall's

It is one of the few films of 1965 that linger in the memory -- a forlorn little Cinderella that the public never took to the big boxoffice ball.

Sep 20, 2023

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Dwight MacDonald

Esquire Magazine

The photography and the direction are atrocious, the jokes painful, the structure really chaotic, the spontaneity arthritic, and The Dave Clark Five remarkably uncharming and unwitty.

Aug 13, 2019

Full Review

MFB Critics

Monthly Film Bulletin

Two things make this an intriguingly unusual teenage musical: it is consistently worth looking at, and it finds intelligent expression for a genuinely youthful point of view.

Jan 25, 2018

Full Review

Ken Hanke

Mountain Xpress (Asheville, NC)

A fascinating outburst of strangeness of almost Fellini-esque proportions.

Rated: 4/5

Aug 6, 2008

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Audience Member

Definitely a period piece that does not hold up to its counterpart from the same period A Hard Day's Night. This stars the Dave Clark Five but features no actual performance footage of them playing their songs. Most of it just seems to be Dave Clark playing "Steve" roaming around with the main character blonde girl. There is no real plot it's just them going to different locations and then everybody dancing around to Dave Clark Five music. The only song of note featured in the film is Catch Us If You Can. Not a good movie even if you are a fan of the Dave Clark Five. Avoid it unless you really want to see footage of the U.K in 1965 or are a real die hard fan.

Rated 0.5 out of 5 stars

01/21/23

Full Review

Audience Member

Meh. The Dave Clark Five do their best to recreate "Hard Days Night" to not much effect. John Boorman made his directorial debut with this dud, though you can see hints of his visual style that would surface in his future films. The five plays stuntmen who team up with a model (for the product "meat") and go on wacky adventures in 1960s swinging' London.

Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars

01/31/23

Full Review

Audience Member

It's very true that Dick Lester beat Boorman to the punch with A HARD DAY'S NIGHT and unlike The Beatles the boys from the Dave Clark Five are pretty charisma free but this works far more often than it fails. Well worth seeing.

Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars

02/04/23

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Audience Member

even in its awesomeness its still a "hhard day's night knock-off'

Rated 4 out of 5 stars

01/21/23

Full Review

Audience Member

The light rhythms of the editing and the duration of every camera movement are so absolutely perfect, and every framing is so right... It's Boorman's first feature but the filmmaking is already his most mature. And the movie itself maintains a "mature outlook" on youth that somehow doesn't offer self-righteous hindsight or patronizing nostalgia. Some of the acting inexperience of the Dave Clark Five had to be written around but there is a lot of good dialogue, and Barbara Ferris's performance keeps the story from becoming dippy. Catch Us If You Can has a wonderful documentary aspect, capturing of English streets against the commercial side of pop culture -- with the actors, fake ad campaign and the filmmaking apparatus being toted throughout the country. And it has a great centerpiece that the screenwriter won't let finish as sardonic: an inheritance-fed husband and wife, in a extended quarrel of a marriage, half-tries to seduce the young lovers ... but, as though by necessity of their aging faces, settle on proving that their spouse is jealous. They're confessed escapists, part-time vampires of youth culture. But in participating in the runaway couple's adventure, they somehow find themselves again and see each other -- unselfconsciously, at a costume party which adult hosts have stocked with youths -- as if the painful years had never transpired. It feels like a youthful wish implanted in the audience: wanting against all probability that the husband and wife will remember each other like that once the scene is over.

Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars

02/01/23

Full Review

Audience Member

Brilliant film! The first produced by Boorman, it is a healthy antidote to the more summery films of the 60s like Help. The car--an E-type Jaguar--alone makes it worth watching!

Rated 5 out of 5 stars

01/21/23

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John Boorman

Director

Barbara Ferris

Dinah

David Lodge

Louis

Lenny Davidson

Lenny

Rick Huxley

Rick

Mike Smith

Mike

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Synopsis

British TV stuntmen (Barbara Ferris) hit the road with a bored actress (David Lodge), whose manager (Lenny Davidson) reports her kidnapped.

Director: John Boorman
Screenwriter: Peter Nichols
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Production Co: Warner Brothers/Seven Arts
Genre: Musical, Comedy
Original Language: English (United Kingdom)
Release Date (Theaters): Aug 18, 1965, Limited
Release Date (Streaming): Mar 11, 2017
Runtime: 1h 31m

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