370 Cliff in Color! The Technicolor Musicals of Cliff Richard 1961-1964

[colinr0380]

Essentially an updating of the old "let's put on a show" story, the film charts the efforts of a gang of perky, musically-inclined teens to save their West End youth club which has been targeted for demolition by hard-nosed developer Hamilton Black (Morley) to make room for office buildings. Unbeknown to the other kids, their leader Nicky (Richard) is actually Black's son, something that makes their plans involving a money-making anonymous radio hit very complicated -- and messes with his budding romance with Toni (Gray). That's basically the framework for a string of song-and-dance numbers, which feature both the awesome beat-flavored string work of The Shadows and more classical, sweeping production numbers.

It is interesting to speculate from that write up on whether the basic plot structure of The Young Ones carried forward to Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo!

[MichaelB]

I'm glad the review points out a key visual difference between Wonderful Life and the other two—it was shot in the cheaper Techniscope process rather than full anamorphic widescreen, with the result that the picture is inevitably grainier, as the negative effectively has half the vertical resolution of normal 35mm.

Someone elsewhere was hyperbolically suggesting that the old DVD looks "a hundred times better" than Indicator's BD, but I suspect the issue here is that the grain is much more visible in high definition than it was on the DVD, and so the fact that it looks different from the other two films is much more obvious. But it always did look different.

[colinr0380]

Very important in properly assessing the film as well, as if the film was shot on what Mondo Digital says was the "much cheaper Techniscope format", that itself provides an implication to suggest that the production company was drawing back a bit on splurging all out on Cliff Richard starring musical films.

[onedimension]

Are these movies any good? Or "good"? I have my eye on the set, but mostly (like with the Indicator set for the Ormond family) as a curio of cultural history..

[colinr0380]

I would probably bracket them as the UK's attempt at putting Cliff Richard into something akin to Elvis-style movies, which themselves were not really what Presley was best remembered for. I guess that makes Summer Holiday the equivalent to Jailhouse Rock, though much less hip!

As the Mondo Digital review points out, it is rather bizarre that a couple of these films are getting their disc debuts in this US only set first and have never made it to Blu-ray in the UK yet, where there would probably be at least some in built audience. But that is probably the vagaries of rights between territories causing that issue.