Expresso Bongo (1960)

Watching any film 50 years after you last saw it is, at any time, a mildly unnerving experience. A film that boasts the dubious title 'Expresso Bongo' and features a not-greatly post-pubescent Cliff Richard should have provided a strong warning that turning back the clock is not always a good idea but, actually, this was a great pleasure. Based on a successful stage musical and set in the heart of the Soho music industry of the late 1950s as it comes to terms with rock and roll , 'Expresso Bongo' retains a salty edge even now. Laurence Harvey plays a chancer who happens to come across a young rocker (Cliff Richard) who he seeks to exploit shamelessly but who then proves more than a match for him. With a sharp, pungent and funny script (by 50s star writer Wolf Mankowitz) and plenty of night location shooting in Soho, the film fizzes along for the most part, resembling 'Sweet Smell of Success', but with songs and a slightly softer edge. The version on this DVD has been shorn of its extrinsic musical numbers (including one sung by old-style musical promoter Maier Tzelniker that I remember well, starting 'When I compare these little bleeders to the chorus from Aida….nausea!') but still has time for the wonderfully cynical 'Shrine on the Second Floor', as Cliff is propelled into religiosity to further his career. Harvey's weaselly good looks are just right and Sylvia Sims is very sexy as his long-suffering stripper girlfriend. Even Cliff acquits himself well, with just the right amount of ambivalence as to his complicity (including being asked, not for the last time, why he has no girlfriend). In a film where everyone is either on the make or being exploited, sometimes at the same time, there is at least one poignant real-life parallel. The distinguished stage actress Hermione Baddelley here plays a veteran street tart. She has a couple of affectionate scenes with Harvey, with whom, despite their age difference, she had a relationship in the early 1950s just as his career was getting under way. Now, Harvey was on a roll and would shortly go to Hollywood on the strength of his next film, 'Man at the Top'.

Laurence Harvey gives an agonizing performance in the agonizing "Expresso Bongo," a British film from 1959.A fast-talking low-life agent, Johnny Jackson (Harvey) discovers a young bongo player/singer (Cliff Richard) from a poor family, renames him Bongo Herbert, and brings him to stardom by wheeling and dealing. Shades of Colonel Parker, especially when he takes half of Bongo's earnings. When the singer meets an American star, Dixie Collins (Yolande Donlan) who is making a triumphant return to London, Jackson starts to lose control of his talent.I have no idea what Laurence Harvey, normally a very fine actor, thought he was doing in his portrayal of Johnny Jackson. He comes off like an imitation of Phil Silvers, except when Phil Silvers did this kind of shtick he was hilarious. He's way, way over the top.I watched this film because I wanted to see the young Cliff Richard. Richard was not in this film enough, nor did he sing enough. The speaking voices of some of the other actors, such as Avis Bonnage as Bongo's mother, and Sylvia Syms as Jackson's girlfriend Maisie) were so annoying and incessantly high pitched and screamy, at one point I nearly stopped watching. Richard himself is very natural, not really acting, and he did well in the musical numbers.Sir Cliff Richard was the U.K.'s answer to Elvis and has more top 10 hits than any other artist, spanning a remarkable 50 years. He has the third-highest number of #1 hits in the UK, behind Elvis and The Beatles. He's an institution. And I hated this movie. Like some of Elvis', it's pretty unwatchable. It's a shame we couldn't do better by our national treasures.

Ignore anything or anybody that denigrates Espresso Bongo. It is loaded with period detail and attitude, is singularly risqué for it's time and sports great music and one of the best scripts about England's Tin Pan Alley, wisecracking and inside, besides an unprecedented performance by Laurence Harvey as you've never seen him, a hustler who recalls Sidney Falco in the "Sweet Smell of Success". Maier Tzelnicker is tremendous as the record company executive who calls it "rock dreck". Yolanda Donlan, Val Guest's wife, plays a "Sweet Bird of Youth" like aging diva Alexandra Del Lago who seduces Cliff Richard, whom many called the Pat Boone of England. See the opening strip number when the girls perform a burlesque version of the "Bonnie, Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond". It sets the tone for an overlooked gem. A "B" Movie Classic. Enjoy.

It's really about a hustler-turned-agent (Laurence Harvey) and how opportunity comes (and passes him by) via his finding (and losing) the kid-with-talent (Cliff Richard). A scene I liked was where the agent and the label exec (Meier Tzelniker) shamelessly discuss their plans for Bongo Herbert's future - i.e., what can he do for them, never mind what he can do for himself.This might have been a much more memorable movie with a bit more backing and some rewrites. It starts (and ends) by taking us to the cruddier side of London ca. 1960 - strippers, noisy streets, the grime, the neon-lights - all of it filled with the never-was's and the never-will-be's hoping against hope for That One Break. No U.S. movie at the time would ever have thought of this, whereas this U.K. movie did so without any Hollywood-esque qualms about "how will it play in Peoria?"Strange to think: when this movie, about a young rocker getting started, was released there was a band of Liverpool kids who got a gig in a dive on the Hamburg Reeperbahn ...One last bit: check out an uncredited kid named Susan Hampshire. She has four lines but she ante-dates Monty Python's "Upper-Class-Twit-of-the-Year" sketch by 10 years - she does it to a t.