Films
By the time of the British Invasion Elvis Presley had established the pattern of making a film in which he acted and performed enough songs to release an album from the soundtrack. On August 7, 1964, The Beatles’ motion picture A Hard Day’s Night was released in the United States. Reviews were mixed, with TIME magazine placing a headline over their review which read “BEATLES BLOW IT”. It made $1.3 million in its first week, equivalent to just under $8 million in 2018. It wasn’t long before a slew of films appeared featuring British Invasion bands. Some were produced to provide publicity for the bands, others actually tried to tell a story.
In 1965, the Dave Clark Five released the film Catch Us If You Can in England, which was titled Having a Wild Weekend in the United States. Unlike the Beatles, who portrayed themselves in their films, the Dave Clark Five instead appeared as a team of stuntmen, who after quitting their jobs and stealing a Jaguar encounter a series of outlandish events. As they do their music plays over the soundtrack. In the UK the film competed with a Brian Epstein vehicle titled Ferry Cross the Mersey which featured appearances and performances of several of the acts from Liverpool which were part of the stable of bands run by the Beatles’ manager.
Herman’s Hermits appeared in the musical film When the Boys Meet the Girls, starring Connie Francis, in 1966, appearing as themselves. They also appeared in Hold On! in which NASA astronauts want to name a Gemini space capsule after the band for good luck. NASA dispatches a scientist to follow the band on tour to learn all he can about them. Upon its release the New York Times commented that it was “occasionally amusing but nonsensical”. A final film by Herman’s Hermits was titled after one of their hits, Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter, and centered on the band on a British tour and an inherited racing greyhound. It too was widely panned.
The films made evident something not easily realized in America, in which all the acts of the invasion were simply British. In Great Britain there were a variety of different sounds arising, the sounds of the Merseyside from Liverpool, or the Tottenham sound as expressed by the Dave Clark Five. Inside jokes and place references known to British audiences were not understood by Americans, who had never heard of a toad in the hole, or knew what the word loo meant. The point of many of the films was to collect several of a band’s most popular songs in one vehicle, supported by a soundtrack album.
Not all of the films made by artists of the British Invasion were poorly made and poorly received by critics. Petula Clark, who regenerated a flagging recording career with the international hit Downtown in 1964, later appeared in two films. Her performance in Finian’s Rainbow with Fred Astaire was nominated for a Golden Globe Award. She also appeared in Goodbye Mr. Chips in 1969 in a performance which was well received by critics. Still, the majority of the films featuring the bands of the British Invasion were simply vehicles to exploit their popularity and make money for the studios.