Ken Russell turned down Summer Holiday but the same producer and writers came back and asked him to do this comedy. He would have been better off with the Cliff Richard musical - which was in colour and had songs.
This feels like it should be a musical. It definitely should be in colour but it's in drab black and white even though it was set in a seaside town.
The basic idea is fun - two workers in said seaside town decide to jazz up business by importing a French movie star and having a film festival and a nudist beach. You can see the chances for satire at admittedly easy targets - French new wave, Cannes, nudity, etc.
The film doesn't quite work, although made by people with talent - you can tell the director is talented - but everyone is miscast. Ken Russell is miscast as a director of comedy - though producer Kenneth Harper wouldn't have known that at the time (well, perhaps the complete absence of comedy films he did for TV but... he was entitled to take a punt). Russell pulls out a lot of tricks - there's energy and movement, but he doesn't have a feel for the characters or the town. It's all surface. That surface has a charm... but it doesn't have the love that he would show in say The Boyfriend.
James Booth is miscast as a comic lead. A sowering glowering actor, a talented performer, he did this after Zulu. He's not a lot of fun to be around in a role that really required a Frankie Howerd or Benny Hill. Or even a young pop star like Cliff Richard because Roy Kinnear is great fun as Booth's sidekick and he could have handled the comedy.
Alita Naughton is inexperienced as the true love interest but is lovely and winning and Russell uses her well. She even sings a song - on a ukulele I think. The movie could have done with more more musical numbers. Naughton suits the film a lot better than Booth - I never at any stage wanted them to get together. Booth just comes across as lecherous.
Kinnear is excellent and Marissa Mell - an actress I'm mainly familiar with from William Goldman talking about her performance in Mata Hari in The Season - is fun as the star. The support cast are decent as they tend to be in British films.
There's slap stick chases, lots of rain, films within films, grotesques. You can feel the influence of Jacques Tati and French cinema. Naughton goes nude into the beach at the end and you can see her bare backside which is a bit of a jolt for 1963 film if not Ken Russell. There's a bunch of other naked bums as the townsfolk come in.
It's a really odd film. It's the sort of movie I enjoyed more on a second viewing because it didn't have the pressure to be funny and you could appreciate the way out visuals.
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