Reviews

As an unreconstructed Stones fan this film is a favourite slice of pop history. Andrew Loog Oldham as the Stones manager at the time was desperate to get the band on film after seeing the impact of the Beatles Movies. He was introduced to Pete Whitehead who had made a film called Wholly Communion which recorded Alan Ginsberg, Alexander Trochi and other giants of the poetry world performing to a packed Royal Albert Hall and in the process giving birth to what became the underground art movement of the 60's.

The original cut featured more of Brian Jones and in a move that may have started his marginalisation within the group Oldham had his footage trimmed and some footage from a London gig that showed the band being mobbed on stage inserted. This footage also featured in Whiteheads "Tonight lets make love in London". Oldham also inserted some music from the "Andrew Loog Oldham Orchestra" doing some Stones tracks.

The rights to the film and its soundtrack became confused when the band became managed by Alan Klein and was completely unavailable for some years. A version released on video in the UK had all of the original music replaced by soundalikes.

My favourite scene is a drunken Mick Jagger doing an Elvis impersonation and a surreal moment when he poses for some snaps with an unidentified family. Also funny but sad is the moment Brian Jones is lost for words when Whitehead asks him to define the word "surealism".

Despite giving a glimpse at some intriguing archive footage this treads the same path as previous looks at Hitch's career. Shame whoever was responsible for researching this piece chose to pull out (amongst others) the old chestnut about the failure of "Torn Curtain". If they had done their job better they might have pointed out that at the time of its release it was Universals top box office grosser of all time some failure. Also wasn't Spielberg hanging around Universal during the Hitchcock years? I've never seen or heard of him talking about his co-worker.

As has been pointed out the director of this special seemingly chose to leave out the titles which fell outside the rather limp thesis. While not wishing to take anything away from my favourite director I think the time has come to remember that movie-making is a collaborative process and one of Hitchs strengths was working with an enormously talented set of creative personnel (often referred to rather disparagingly as technicians) who supported his creativity and raised it to new levels.

Film fans have struggled long and hard to try and make a case for Jess Franco Dario Argento Jose Laraz et al as misunderstood genii, struggling in the lower depths of cinema crafting unrecognized and unsung masterpieces . Trevor Barley has blown the gaff with his 'Fantom Kiler' series showing that the only important quality that any of these giallos-euro shockers have for their fans is the visceral thrill of seeing attractive and generally naked women sliced and diced . TB has opted for the graphic approach eschewing the atmosphere plot suspense and other attempts at providing entertainment employed by his role models. Given the apparent budget I'm sure he has made some money from his efforts, hopefully enough to pay his legal fees if the worthies from the Office of Trading Standards or the Police notice him and enquire why he has not submitted his films to the British Film and Video Classification procedures required by all films distributed in the UK.

While this film presents itself as a comedy drama it is neither funny nor dramatic. It makes the common mistakes like trying to say too much and be too clever and inevitably fails to achieve either. The initial failure is in the script which never finds a focus, and is endlessly wordy without being witty . The Direction is however worse driving whatever might of been made of the script into the ground. The cast no two of whom appear to be reading from the same page act like a lot of scared rabbits caught in a cars headlights waiting to be run over. In short its the sort of mess thrown together with tax shelter money that gives British Cinema a bad name. While the time and effort required to make it has been wasted forever you can save some time and effort of your own by switching channels in the unlikely event that this drivel makes a sale and turns up on your TV.