Although this site and Maltin's book claim the film is 110 minutes, the version I just saw on TCM was 94 minutes and I would not have wished it longer. However, I have a thing for "bad" musicals of the 60s and 70s, the post-classic era of transition (or dissolution, actually) of the form, when all kinds of things were happening. Thanks to rock music, musicals were evolving towards the music-video stage when a number needn't be a stage-able event that happens to photographed. Even the old Busby Berkley numbers, though supremely cinematic and incapable of being presented on a theatrical stage, were essentially staged events (on the soundstage) with editing linking together the separate fanciful bits. But in "The Telephone Hour" sequence in "Bye Bye Birdie," for example, there is little or no choreography EXCEPT through the editing; the bits of film are being choreographed. This finally arrived as a formal idea in Richard Lester's Beatles films, where he cuts snippets of the band's performance, dropped into the film from nowhere, with other random events.
So this Herman's Hermits film, as another post-Brit Invasion, post-Lester movie, should be right in that modern wave, right? Not quite. Stanley Holloway says at one point "You can't jump with one foot on the ground," and it seems that most of the movie has both feet in the old tradition of musical entertainment, both in content and form, aiming squarely at the middle class audience rather than excitable youngsters. It's a trad rags-to-riches plot (rather than being a snapshot of a famous band like the Beatles movies), and they don't even care about being rock stars, only in the supremely dull dog-racing plot. In the end (SPOILERS, if it matters), they haven't quite made it yet and Peter Noone does not get the rich girl but may settle for the poor-but-honest local girl who moons for him. It's a very unhurried film, to say the least. It's best virtue is the location filming in Manchester and London, which gives it a true sense of place. You do get the sense that these are plain lads in a real world who have to work for a living. The Mod elements are purely cosmetic; film spends more time on music-hall songs than the glimpses of wacky hairdos and Carnaby Street clothes.
But we can see that it employs 3 kinds of musical number. There's what you might call the integrated or performance number, where the reason people are singing and dancing is that a professional band is performing in some venue, just as you might see in real life. Then there's what you might call the inherent or organic number that we associate with musicals; life is a world where people spontaneously sing and dance in the street. These numbers are given to other characters than the Hermits, and one of these numbers, a nostalgic song by the older characters about the younger ones, is presented in a non-stageable, creatively edited, music-video manner (using split-screen). Finally there is what you might call the internalized number (another progressive music-video idea), in which a character (or the film itself) seems merely to be thinking the song to himself/itself on the soundtrack while we view the activities of characters who go about their business without any idea that a song is going on. This is how "There's a Kind of Hush All Over the World" is presented; the reality is that Noone is in bed woolgathering, but what we see is his imagined self wandering across a bridge and through the country where couples are wooing; he is not singing but we hear him anyway.
So this Herman's Hermits film, as another post-Brit Invasion, post-Lester movie, should be right in that modern wave, right? Not quite. Stanley Holloway says at one point "You can't jump with one foot on the ground," and it seems that most of the movie has both feet in the old tradition of musical entertainment, both in content and form, aiming squarely at the middle class audience rather than excitable youngsters. It's a trad rags-to-riches plot (rather than being a snapshot of a famous band like the Beatles movies), and they don't even care about being rock stars, only in the supremely dull dog-racing plot. In the end (SPOILERS, if it matters), they haven't quite made it yet and Peter Noone does not get the rich girl but may settle for the poor-but-honest local girl who moons for him. It's a very unhurried film, to say the least. It's best virtue is the location filming in Manchester and London, which gives it a true sense of place. You do get the sense that these are plain lads in a real world who have to work for a living. The Mod elements are purely cosmetic; film spends more time on music-hall songs than the glimpses of wacky hairdos and Carnaby Street clothes.
But we can see that it employs 3 kinds of musical number. There's what you might call the integrated or performance number, where the reason people are singing and dancing is that a professional band is performing in some venue, just as you might see in real life. Then there's what you might call the inherent or organic number that we associate with musicals; life is a world where people spontaneously sing and dance in the street. These numbers are given to other characters than the Hermits, and one of these numbers, a nostalgic song by the older characters about the younger ones, is presented in a non-stageable, creatively edited, music-video manner (using split-screen). Finally there is what you might call the internalized number (another progressive music-video idea), in which a character (or the film itself) seems merely to be thinking the song to himself/itself on the soundtrack while we view the activities of characters who go about their business without any idea that a song is going on. This is how "There's a Kind of Hush All Over the World" is presented; the reality is that Noone is in bed woolgathering, but what we see is his imagined self wandering across a bridge and through the country where couples are wooing; he is not singing but we hear him anyway.