The 1960s

The Cliff Richard Film Musicals.

Theodor Adorno's assertion that "popular music for the masses is a perpetual
busman's holiday" (Adorno 210-11) suggests to me the Cliff Richard film
Summer Holiday (1963). In the film, Cliff Richard plays a mechanic who with
some coworkers borrows a bus from their workplace and drives across Europe,
serving up a number of wholesome songs along the way. Adorno's rather catchy
phrase underlines what he saw as the conservative nature and function of
popular music, and Cliff Richard's career perhaps has substantiated Adorno's
observation. Starting as a rock 'n' roll singer, Cliff (as he is fondly
known in Britain) developed into a unique British cultural institution. He
became a born again Christian and spoke in favor of censorship, represented
Britain in the Eurovision Song Contest, and sang spontaneously to the
rain-drenched crowd at the Wimbledon Tennis Championship. His status as a
key icon of Britain since the 1950s was confirmed by his knighthood in 1996,
which was an almost unprecedented acknowledgment of the power of pop music
and a confirmation of Cliff's cultural status. In light of his popularity,
it seems timely to reassess the earliest period of his career and the part
that films played in his conversion from a rock 'n' rolling Elvis look-alike
to a mainstream youth figure. The conversion directly reflected the changes
in pop music culture, the British negotiation of American youth culture, and
the addition of rock 'n' roll to the traditional musical film.
Cliff Richard held a preeminent position in British pop music from 1959
until the appearance of the Beatles in 1963, producing 22 Top-10 records.(1)
He went straight from the pop chart to the cinema screen, making an
inauspicious film debut in Serious Charge (1958), going on to costar in
Expresso Bongo (1959), and then starting in three musical vehicles, The
Young Ones (1961), Summer Holiday (1963), and Wonderful Life (1964). I will
focus on these films because after 1964 his film career waned, although he
continued to appear in the occasional (unsuccessful) musical vehicle while
his recording career proceeded without impediment.

Cliff's films illustrate the change from representing rock 'n' rollers as
delinquents (as in his first film) to representing them as "good kids" (in
his later films). This duplicates the subsuming of rock 'n' roll into
established modes of popular music, something that is made highly apparent
in the three musicals of the early 1960s. Cliff's films are also a part of
the process, marking a hybridization of rock 'n' roll with established modes
of entertainment, both in terms of styles of music and in terms of the
images. In Sounds of the City, Charlie Gillett cites Cliff as one of the
major figures in the transformation of rock 'n' roll into pop music (Gillett
257), and Dick Bradley refers to "rock-pop" as the musical form that emerged
from the confluence of rock 'n' roll and the desire of the record industry
to sell to more than teenaged audiences (Bradley 71). Cliff's films not only
manifest this but dramatize it - they act out the process.

In the late 1950s there were rumblings in the British trade press about the
possibilities of popular music working for British films. Kinematograph
Weekly speculated that "the adage 'Trade follows the film' could become
'Box-office follows the record.' . . . [British] talent can do the most good
for the British film industry in the vein of popular music: the vein that
could carry the life-blood of British films to the heart of the American
market."(2) Cliff's films looked like they might make an impression on the
international cinematic body, but they failed, and it was left to the
Beatles to bring British films to the U.S. market as a part of the
large-scale British record invasion of the U.S. charts in the mid 1960s.

Icons: The Coffee Bar, The Rock 'n' Roller

British rock 'n' roll was pioneered in London's 2Is coffee bar in Soho,
where Tommy Steele was discovered and Cliff played.(3) Around that time a
number of cafes became spaces that allowed the flowering of an organic pop
music culture in Britain. They served as meeting places for the subculture
youth and the only testing ground for people with musical ambitions. The 2Is
care regularly had performances from what was to become the new generation
of popular musicians, performers who were inspired by American rock 'n' roll
and who established an indigenous brand of the new form.

By the late 1950s and early 1960s, this culture as well as the national
consciousness of the rock 'n' roll coffee bar had been translated into a
metonymic icon in British films. Monthly Film Bulletin's review of She Knows
Y'Know (1961) noted that the film has "a pop singer and a coffee bar thrown
in to prove that the film's makers are bang up to date";(4) the same
publication's review of Mix Me a Person (1962) declared, "Mix Me A Person
has been done up contemporary - which roughly means that the nightclub of a
few years ago has been replaced by guitars and espresso in Battersea."(5) By
1960, five films had already located rock 'n' roll solidly in coffee bars:
The Tommy Steele Story (1957), Serious Charge (1958), The Golden Disc
(1958), Beat Girl (1959), and Expresso Bongo (1959). The Tommy Steele Story
establishes through biography the coffee bar culture that was the center of
British rock 'n' roll. It replayed Steele's "discovery" in the 2Is cafe and
allowed him the rare and highly privileged position of playing himself in
his own biographical film. Expresso Bongo is perhaps the film that documents
the culture most fully. It not only satirizes the new breed of manipulative
managers that grew up around the new musical culture but firmly sets the
music's origin in coffee bars, situating rock 'n' roller figures as a
central component of the cinematic coffee bar.

Britain imported the figure of the rock 'n' roller directly (lock, stock,
and barrel) from the United States. It was inspired largely by the startling
image of Elvis Presley.(6) According to Cliff, the media decided he was
"England's answer to Elvis, and that's what I became. . . . I was fodder. I
looked right. I sang rock 'n' roll . . . "(Savage 43). Serious Charge's
producer Mickey Delamar approached Lionel Bart for songs for the film. Bart
said, "[T]hey wanted a delinquent kid who sounded a bit like Presley . . ."
(Roper 21), so he recommended Cliff for the part that director Terence Young
had added solely to draw a younger audience (Turner 140). Young Cliff's part
in the film did not escape notice: the "songs, logically introduced by Cliff
Richards [sic], a popular teenage singer, widen [the film's] scope."(7)

Serious Charge focuses on juvenile delinquents, for which it uses rock 'n'
roll.as a sign,(8) siting the intertwined discourses of youth, delinquency,
and rock 'n' roll in a coffee bar. It is primarily a drama, with an
established star (Anthony Quayle), focusing on juvenile delinquents and
associating pop music with them. Cliff sings along to his own records that
are played on the jukebox. Beat Girl (1959) similarly equates rock 'n' roll
with delinquency and is also like Serious Charge in terms of the film's
articulation of songs, as Adam Faith sings along with the jukebox. Both
films seem unsure how to integrate pop songs and dramatic performances, with
the result that they attempt to contain the pop-song performances within a
vaguely believable diegetic scenario.

In the Serious Charge sequence in which Cliff performs "Living Doll" the
camera focuses on Cliff sitting in a chair, with his leg slung over its arm,
as he sings adjacent to a hand-jiving woman. After a few bars of his
performance, the camera moves away from him, and the music recedes in volume
as dialogue takes place between two of the other "delinquent" characters in
the coffee bar. This sequence seems to have a dual and contradictory
function; it denotes "delinquency" for the adult audience, and on the flip
side it provides enjoyment for teenage audiences who like Cliff and rock 'n'
roll.

This emphasis on delinquency changed after Serious Charge. Cliff's next
three musical vehicles show the young as benign. Indeed The Young Ones and
Wonderful Life show the older generation as ignorant and, in viewing the
younger generation as hoodlums, generally malign. This was a central
structural principle of all of Cliff's films up to 1964. Indeed, the liner
notes for the soundtrack of The Young Ones states that the youth club gives
teenagers "a chance to let off steam with their rock'n'roll music and also
acts as a retreat where they can escape the narrow and disapproving world of
the adult."(9) This portrayal of the young as misrepresented can be seen as
easing the entry of rock 'n' roll performers to more adult, traditional
modes of entertainment, specifically to the lucrative cabaret and variety
circuit, where they catered to an audience that wanted slow and old standard
songs rather than purely rock 'n' roll songs. In terms of television and
career, this presented Cliff Richard with the possibility of moving from Oh
Boy! to Val Parnell's show and Saturday Night at the London Palladium.

Cliff later said, "When we sang 'Rock'n'roll is here to stay' we didn't know
it would turn out to be true" (Savage 44). His career changed quickly, from
rocker to family entertainer, much as had that of his British rock 'n' roll
predecessor Tommy Steele. Steele had moved into films immediately, starring
in his own biopic, and had then made films with ever-decreasing rock 'n'
roll content. In 1959, Kinematograph Weekly reported ABC's collaboration
with national tie-ins for Steele's third film, Tommy the Toreador,(10)
including a Decca EP, Little White Bull, sheet music, woollen toy, toreador
outfit, knitting patterns, bath mat, holiday competition, and a hand
puppet - although it does not clarify whether the puppet is of the bull or
of Steele!

The Recuperation of Rock 'n' Roll

Rock 'n' roll's recuperation by established popular music can be equated
with the symbolic acceptance of teens in those films. Cliff's three musicals
of the early 1960s exhibit traditional popular music and rock 'n' roll as
profoundly different discourses, side by side; yet at certain points in the
films the hybridization of the forms is also apparent. Dick Bradley sees
rock 'n' roll's emergence in 1954-58 as manifesting a "codal fusion"
(Bradley 57-59) between European musical codes and African-originated
musical codes. The musical state of flux that ensued led to a refolding in
of the codes and the subsuming of rock 'n' roll styles by the new pop music
from around 1958. In fact, 1959 was a critical year for rock 'n' roll. It
looked to have disintegrated, with Elvis having joined the army the previous
year, Little Richard punching the Bible as much as the piano, Chuck Berry's
underage-sex charge, Jerry Lee Lewis's scandal about his teenage bride, and
Buddy Holly's death. The rise to prominence of other musical forms, like
calypso, suggested that rock 'n' roll may have passed.

The trajectory of Cliff Richard's film career dramatized the current of
eliding into more traditional forms of entertainment. Cliff's film debut in
Serious Charge (1957) features him singing in a coffee bar, rock 'n' roll
being equated with youth and delinquency; by the time of Wonderful Life
(1964), rock 'n' roll songs are just about having "good clean fun" on the
beach. As part of a larger trend, Cliff Richard's songs in the films become
increasingly inflected by (if not explicitly originating in) the style of
Tin Pan Alley - "rock" is replaced by ballads. Richard's three films of the
early 1960s can be seen to encapsulate the conflict between rock songs and
more traditional popular music, which appear in the films most blatantly as
uneasy bedfellows.

Cliff's breakthrough hit, Move It, the first big British-written rock 'n'
roll hit in the United Kingdom, had reached number 2 in the charts in
September 1958. In April 1959, Cliff recorded the songs from Serious Charge
for an EP, as stipulated by the film's contract (Savage 44). "Living Doll"
was slowed down and rearranged "country style." It became a massive hit,
"redefined him as a singer" (Turner 1993, 143), and "helped Cliff to cross
the divide between the rock world and the entertainment universe" (Roper 23)
and to collect the money of adults as well as their offspring. Charlie
Gillett sees rock 'n' roll as having "petered out" around 1958, partly
because of the industry's recuperation of rock 'n' roll (3). Expresso Bongo
suggests that rock 'n' roll musicians inevitably move into the mainstream,
manifesting what Bradley noted as the "emergence of 'smooth' rock singers"
(Bradley 142). George Melly stated, "Richard is the key figure in relation
to the castration of the first British pop explosion. Steele may have
abandoned pop for show biz but Richard dragged pop into show biz" (Melly
70). However, the changes in musical form mark a folding back of musical
codes, the mutation of existing forms of rock 'n' roll and popular music
rather than the simple "selling out" of which Cliff was accused.

Cliff said about "Living Doll": "It wasn't an all-out rocker . . .
rock'n'roll seemed to be fairly limited as a beaty form of music because the
public weren't buying it in their hundreds of thousands. We were the first
teenagers and ten year olds [who] had no money to spend so in the end
records like Living Doll sold because they appealed to parents who had
money" (Turner 143). Gillett sums up the recuperation of rock 'n' roll:

Having failed to rival any of the first generation of American rock'n'roll
stars, the British music industry recovered its ground as the Americans
replaced the originals with a new generation of more conventional
entertainers, under the canny guidance of publishers who were keen to supply
the right kind of teen-romance material. Once the focus was back to songs,
rather than mysteriously indefinable concepts such as rhythmic feel and
authenticity, the British industry was able to deliver the goods again:
singers with the appropriate qualities of vulnerability (to their audience)
and malleability (to their managers). (Gillett 256)

Lionel Bart, who had originally been in Tommy Steele's rock group Cavemen
but rapidly became a stage musicals personality, had written the song as
precisely a "rock 'n' roll song," yet the rock 'n' rollers had turned it
back, toward the mainstream, toward Tin Pan Alley.

This melding of musical styles is evident in Expresso Bongo, as is the
explicit charting of the submerging of rock 'n' roll into popular music and
established structures of entertainment. In the 1959 film, his second, Cliff
plays young rock 'n' roll singer Bongo Herbert to Lawrence Harvey's slick
drummer turned agent. A review noted that Expresso Bongo "breaks out of the
rut of wishy-washy gentility. . . . It is loud, brash and vulgar."(11)

Although the association of coffee bars and rock with delinquency had become
something of a standard for British films of the late 1950s and early 1960s,
Expresso Bongo, a more prestigious film than the earlier rock 'n' roll
"exploitation" films, integrated pop music with a mainstream dramatic
narrative set in the world of popular music. Expresso Bongo seemingly
reenacted the music industry's discovery of Cliff Richard in the 2Is cafe,
much as The Tommy Steele Story had with the discovery of Steele. However, it
grafted this onto a very traditional narrative, that of the naive artist
being exploited by the managerial hustler. It was based on Wolf Mankowitz's
stage play and used the songs from the stage production, yet it was
primarily a dramatic film that was set in the musical, and specifically pop
musical, milieu rather than a traditional film musical.

The musical narrative of the film certainly suggests the submerging of rock
'n' roll. The film's succession of songs provides both a career and a
musical progression: from the first song in the coffee bar, "Love," which
has a wild beat matched by kinetic fast cutting, to the static and
relatively lifeless but more emotionally coded song set in the theater as
part of a variety show ("The Shrine on the Second Floor"), which is shown in
a very sedate alternation of medium shot and close-up. Between these
extremes there is Cliff's hit from the film, "Voice in the Wilderness," a
slow ballad that he performs to please the record company boss Mayer and
television pundit Gilbert Harding.(12) Although this is also performed in a
coffee bar, the tempo and musical movement of the song cause its visual
rendering to be relatively static and undynamic.

The film proved a great success, and Cliff's abilities were noted: "Expresso
Bongo . . . is easily the number one release. Thanks partly to the
popularity of Cliff Richard, the teenagers' idol. Come what may, Expresso
Bongo is certain to be in the year's top half-dozen."(13) Cliff, like his
character in the film, Bongo Herbert, became a pioneer of melding rock 'n'
roll with traditional popular music, allowing him an extended career as more
than simply a rock 'n' roll singer, as his successive films demonstrate.

The Young Ones

Cliff said later, "We knew that mums and dads had the money. Living Doll got
me a mum and dad audience. The Young Ones movie moved me very solidly into
it" (Savage 44). The Young Ones was Cliff's next cinematic venture, and it
received critical acclaim for both the film and the music, although some
reviewers were happier with certain aspects more than others:

The freshness and enthusiasm of the young cast and the crisp performance of
the Associated British Orchestra under Stanley Black compensate for the thin
tones of Cliff Richard, the twangy guitar of the Shadows, and the
sub-standard rock numbers that mix uneasily with the tuneful work of Peter
Myers and Ronald Cass. (Vallance 41)

The division between the Myers/Cass songs and rock 'n' roll-based pop music
is highly evident in the film. Added to this, The Young Ones constructs
Cliff as schizophrenic, as alternately a respectable "suit" and a teen rock
'n' roller. This seems to reflect Cliff's career at that point, when he was
still doing rock 'n' roll songs but was also famed for more traditionally
styled ballads and variety performances. The music in the film reflects this
position precisely, interpolating rockabilly and mellow show tunes. The
difference between the genres of music is startling: Within a short space of
time, the film interposes music such as the full-blooded rock 'n' roll of
"Got a Funny Feeling" with a music hall routine that includes old songs like
"Algy the Piccadilly Johnny" ("with the little glass eye"!). Indeed, the
music hall sequence functions to propose a continuity between the music in
this film, and thus the film itself, and traditional, "adult" forms of
musical entertainment. Kinematograph Weekly said of the music hall sequence,
"[T]he artful tinge of nostalgia widens the film's scope and appeal."(14)

The naivete of perceptions about the film's array of music are reflected in
Kinematograph Weekly's review: "[T]here are fourteen song numbers and at
least two, What Do You Know We've Got a Show and Nothing's Impossible, are
bound to figure in the hit parade."(15) The songs might have done ten years
earlier, but it was the pop songs rather than the show tunes that had a life
outside of the context of the film.(16)

The song "The Young Ones" has a pivotal position in terms of musical style.
Although it has a rock 'n' roll-derived instrumentation, it conspicuously
includes the Norrie Paramor Strings, providing a soaring answer to each sung
line of the verse. The film version differs from the single release in that
it loses the impressive guitar and tom-tom introduction. The expressed
purpose of ditching the fanfarelike introduction is that of bonding the song
to the film through segueing it with the film's nondiegetic score. In fact,
Stanley Black's score asserts its power over Cliff, by playing around with
the melody before he starts singing.(17)

The form of the song "The Young Ones" suggests a stylistic divide, with the
singing in the first section being more sedate than the variation section,
which has more rock 'n' roll singing. "The Young Ones" has a sparse and
clean sound (unlike the two rockabilly songs that appear in the film), with
a soaring and melodic vocal line that only occasionally contains the gruff
inflections and exuberant melismas that seemingly characterized the rock 'n'
roll vocal style. Indeed, the vocal delivery is extremely pedestrian, with
the strings providing an extra dimension of space to the piece. Although the
film dramatizes both lyrically and formally the generation gap, the words to
the song contemplate continuity rather than difference between the youth and
adult worlds: "One day, when the years have flown, then we'll teach the
young ones of our own."

The film The Young Ones has an obvious Hollywood genealogy, namely, the
"puttin' on a show" musicals, the most famous of which are those starting
Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland.(18) Following directly the tradition of that
subgenre, the climactic show aims to solve the youth community's immediate
problems (Altman 235), while Cliff's pirate radio broadcast as "the mystery
singer" manages to unify both the young and the old.

British Pop Musicals

Cliff was now solidly installed in a particularly traditional form of
cinematic entertainment, the film musical. The Hollywood musical style had
never really been successfully imported into British filmmaking. In 1947,
John Huntley wrote, "We have not the right temperament for the 'all-singing,
all-dancing' stuff and now we have realised our weakness, we avoid them. We
can't do big Hollywood musicals and we don't try" (Huntley 93).

Though this was rather dismissive of British musicals, The Young Ones,
Summer Holiday, and Wonderful Life can certainly be seen as attempts to use
the style of the Hollywood musicals, underlined by the importing of U.S.
choreographer Herbert Ross to work on the productions. The Young Ones
signals its antecedents and intentions from the start, commencing with a big
set piece with continuous music and a succession of singers. The Young Ones,
Summer Holiday, and Wonderful Life are prestige productions, especially for
rock 'n' roll star vehicles. They use color and wide-screen format. All are
built around a skeleton of songs written by Peter Myers and Ronald Cass that
display the films' genealogy as mainstream musical comedies. They emulate
the Hollywood tradition with energetic dances, choreographed songs, and duet
interactions between the male and female leads. Each film even contains a
hypertraditional, big medley-set piece section - The Young Ones's music hall
medley, Summer Holiday's mime in the courtroom, and Wonderful Life's "We
Love the Movies," with its succession of film references - yet significantly
each film also reserves a showcase for at least one rock 'n' roll song.

In the 1950s, Kinematograph Weekly asked rhetorically why there were no
British musicals (there were some!):

Can Britain make a successful musical? Yes, as soon as we make one which is
essentially British. We cannot make musicals like On the Town because we
haven't the same mentality and outlook as the Americans and no amount of
talent, technical know-how and facilities will compensate for this. We are
capable of money-making musicals and not on such a high budget as some
people seem to think.(19)

The Young Ones and Summer Holiday proved this to be correct. Kenneth Harper,
the producer of Cliff's three musicals, said, "We hadn't had proper musicals
in the UK before and no one believed we could" (Turner 190). In the light of
the universally perceived British weakness in musical film production,
Monthly Film Bulletin heaped praise on The Young Ones (1961), calling it a
"rare and robust shot at a British musical."(20)

Summer Holiday and Wonderful Life

Summer Holiday is seen by Cliff as the apogee of his film career. Its
treatment of music is particularly interesting, displaying the process of
Cliff's transplantation into more traditional popular music. It is a musical
cornucopia, dense by the standards of any musical film. It contains 11
song-and-dance sequences, music for the opening and end titles, music and
dance sequences tied to a Yugoslavian wedding and a courtroom mime, and
three Shadows instrumentals - a total of 18 musical sections.

Seven of the songs were written by Myers and Cass and follow the stage
musical tradition, both in their materialization on screen and their musical
form. They primarily use orchestral accompaniment - the A.B.S. Orchestra
again - and thus form part of the orchestral fabric that runs through the
film, songs cued easily from Stanley Black's underscore in what Rick Altman
calls audio dissolves (Altman 63). The instrumental homogeneity of the songs
is lessened by some arrangements that draw on the jazz-group tradition; for
example, the duet "A Swingin' Affair" has a jazz drum beat with prominent,
tuned percussion and a jazz-style flute obligato. This song displays most
emphatically the union between styles: Cliff (as Don) has a smooth and
understated pop voice to Barbara's show-style voice, which is replete with
vibrato.

Indeed, "A Swingin' Affair" provides something of a stylistic bridge between
the songs written by Myers and Cass and the Shadows songs. Its instrumental
consistency breaks with the use of orchestral resources, moving the
discourse away from the realm of the stage musical toward a small ensemble
sound. "A Swingin' Affair" may hold more similarity to the Shadows' songs
than the others written by Myers and Cass, yet some of the Shadows songs are
arranged in an instrumental format that diverges from the "classic" rock
sound of guitars and drum. Summer Holiday's penultimate song is the slow
ballad "The Next Time," written by Kaye and Springer, the only song imported
to the film and belonging neither to the Myers and Cass songs nor to the
Shadows songs. However, Cliff Richard's singing is supported by the Shadows
and the Norrie Paramor Strings. The song's arrangement bears little relation
to rock 'n' roll or to the established sound of the Shadows and consists of
strings, a piano with a walking bass, and a slow jazz drum beat. Much like
"A Swingin' Affair" the song is more reminiscent of jazz ballads rather than
the pop songs and instrumentals that appear in the film performed by the
Shadows alone.

Apart from "The Next Time," the Shadows appear on even musical pieces in the
film. All of them bar one were written by the Shadows and bear the hallmarks
of pop song form and instrumentation. In fact, the difference between the
two musical discourses is quite pronounced, with the pieces that feature the
Shadows having pronounced guitar and drum-based dance beats. The Shadows
have their own particular, but rather curtailed, showcase within the film.
They are seen performing in a club, but the image track drifts away from
concentrating on the group to focus on the audience dancing to the music.
Also, "Foot Tapper," later a number I hit, is glossed over, heard as only a
snatch of music on the radio. This suggests the group's marginalization, as
does their losing their instruments to perform what Bruce Welch of the
Shadows called "a real wally dance" (Shadows 132) for Cliff's prescient song
"Bachelor Boy."

Cliff sees his film career as declining after Summer Holiday,(21) and his
next film was a critical and financial failure compared with its
predecessors. In Wonderful Life (1964), rock 'n' roll-based pop music has
been almost fully displaced, and the aesthetic and the music are firmly
derived from the Hollywood musical. The style of the song sequences reflect
the film's stylistic origins in the Hollywood musical in which dances and
interactions is given more emphasis than the actual musical performance by
Cliff with the Shadows. Wonderful Life sees Cliff and his pals involved in
making a film. It has large-scale dances ("To Make This Old World Go Round")
and sexually based interactions in terms of the duets between Cliff and
Susan Hampshire ("In a Matter of Moments," "With a Little Imagination").

Although these techniques were solidly in evidence in The Young Ones and
Summer Holiday, they reach a degree of plenitude in Wonderful Life, and
although the three films seem initially to be homogeneous in their aesthetic
approaches, Wonderful Life can be seen as the logical conclusion of the
process. In the film, rock 'n' roll or pop music has been displaced and the
aesthetic is derived comprehensively from the Hollywood and the stage
musical. Wonderful Life demonstrates a full repertoire of techniques
characteristic of the Hollywood film musical: large-scale choreographed
dance sequences, songs that interpolate dances, duets, and extended medley
song sequences. A prime example is Cliff and the Shadows' dance on a boat on
the Thames, which is choreographed into a troupe formation and also seems to
be unrelated to the film's narrative.

Many of the song sequences are used in a fashion that corresponds with the
narrative patterns of the Hollywood musical, with duets and dances
functioning for the sexual interaction of the principal couple. The film has
not only substituted the more traditional, misunderstood youngster figure
for the rock 'n' roller but has concomitantly displaced rock 'n' roll music
with more traditional popular music. In fact, only four songs out of the
twelve in the film have the appearance of pop songs rather than show songs.
Those four songs ("On the Beach," "What Have I Got to Do," "Do You
Remember?," and "In a Matter of Moments") use a pop or rock'n'roll
instrumentation - all played by the Shadows, although augmented by some
orchestral instruments - rather than the purely orchestral backing that the
other songs receive.

Wonderful Life was Cliff Richard's fifth film and was on release at around
the same time as A Hard Day's Night. The contrast between the two films
could not be more stark, with the Beatles espousing action, cinematic
kinesis, and a foregrounding of pop songs, while Cliff Richard and his
cohorts from his last two films attempt to construct a highly traditional
musical for the cameras in the well-worn manner of Hollywood musicals.

Cliff's later films never reached the heights of his first two musicals of
the early 1960s. In Two a Penny (1966) Cliff stars as a drug dealer who sees
the error of his ways. The film also features evangelist Billy Graham. It
was described by Monthly Film Bulletin as a "Sunday school homily . . . a
naive piece of propaganda."(22) As the film includes only three songs and no
tied-in single, we can see that its concerns are elsewhere. In Finders
Keepers (1966) Cliff looks after a missing bomb for authorities in Spain. By
the 1970s, he appeared in Take Me High (1973), a semitraditional film
musical concerned with selling hamburgers in Birmingham.

Conclusion

Wonderful Life lost money, and during the shoot Cliff "got religion."(23)
News of the Beatles' triumphant tour of the USA, playing music that evinced
a partial return to the styles of rock 'n' roll (Cohn 72), marked the end of
Cliff as Britain's leading pop star in films.

Cliff Richard's films from 1957 to 1964 represent a concerted attempt to
import two specific aspects of American culture into British films. The
first is the figure of the rock 'n' roller, and the second is the Hollywood
musical. The two impulses led to a hybridization in terms of music and the
images of rock 'n' roll and established modes of entertainment. Cliff's
three films of the early 1960s can be seen to encapsulate the conflict
between rock 'n' roll songs and more traditional popular music, which appear
in the films as essentially different discourses. Although some of the songs
in Cliff's musicals demonstrate a degree of synthesis between popular music
styles, others throw a musical opposition into sharp relief: rock 'n' roll
opposed to the traditional stage song.

A space opened for rock 'n' roll music within the traditional film musical
discourse; Cliff became an unthreatening youth figure who sang show tunes.
On the other hand, this also marked the recuperation of rock 'n' roll into
the established structures of mainstream show business and particularly its
submergence into its existent aesthetic formats, which are premised on a
dramatization of the process. This all served Cliff's career wonderfully,
giving him a longevity that is legendary in British popular music. Elvis may
 have been "the King," but Cliff Richard, a British Elvis look-alike, ended
up knighted.

NOTES

1. The British charts according to the New Musical Express charts (up to
1960) and the Record Retailer charts thereafter, quoted in P. Gambaccini, T.
Rice, and J. Rice, The Guinness Book of Hit Singles (London: Guinness
Publishing, 1995).

2. "P. E.: Music Makes or Mars a Good Film," Kinematograph Weekly 473.2563
(27 Sept. 1956): 7 of Studio Review Supplement. The popular music this
statement envisaged was certainly not rock'n'roll.

3. "The British rock'n'roll scene started at the 2Is in the heart of Soho.
There are few who would deny that the little coffee bar at 59 Old Compton
Street, with its cramped basement, was the first spawning ground for the new
breed of musicians springing up, and a happy hunting ground, sometimes in
both senses, for agents and managers early pursuing new talent" (Shadows
34).

4. Monthly Film Bulletin 29.343 (Aug. 1972): 116.

5. Monthly Film Bulletin 29.344 (Sept. 1962): 127.

6. Another British singer who traded on an "Elvis" image was Terry Dene who
appeared in The Golden Disc (1958). The image of Elvis had an impact on
films worldwide. See A. Rai, "An American Raj in Filmistan: Images of Elvis
in Indian Films," Screen 35.1 (spring 1994).

7. Kinematograph Weekly, 504.2695 (Apr. 1959): 17.

8. The film's controversial subject matter, delinquents, and an accusation
of the vicar having "interfered with" one of the youths earned the film an
"X" certificate (for adults only).

9. Liner notes to The Young Ones LP.

10. "Renters' News," Kinematograph Weekly 512.2731 (28 Jan. 1960): 17.

11. Monthly Film Bulletin, 27.312 (Jan. 1960): 2.

12. The Expresso Bongo EP included "Love," "Voice in the Wilderness," and
"Bongo Blues." It was released on 15 Jan. 1960 as a tie-in with the film in
circulation and reached number 14 in the charts. The second single from the
film, "Voices in the Wilderness" (on its own this time), was released in
quick succession, on 22 Jan. 1960. It reached number 2 in the charts.

13. J. Billings, "On Release," Kinematograph Weekly 512.2730 (28 Jan. 1960):
13.

14. Kinematograph Weekly 535.2827 (7 Dec. 1961): 10.

15. Ibid., 10.

16. The contrast of the two musical discourses is nowhere demonstrated
better than in the two versions of "lessons in Love." This song has elements
of rock 'n' roll, being based on the I-VI-IV-V chord progression like many
other rock songs such as "Teenager in Love." On the first occasion of the
song's performance, Cliff sings alone backed by a classic Shadows
accompaniment, while on the second occasion, Cliff duets with Sonya Cordeau
(but with session singer Grazina Frame's voice-over!). This provides an
example of the conflicting discourses in operation: the contrast between
Cliff's voice and the group instrumentation and the female voice, who has a
showtune-style voice with vibrato at the end of each line.

17. When the song reaches the guitar solo, the nondiegetic status of the
music (not the singing) allows it to accompany images of water skiers. This
is an early example of pop music being used as fully nondiegetic music.

18. Asserted by the film's director Sidney Furie in Hollywood UK (BBC
Television series, 1992).

19. "P. E.: Banging the Drum for the Music Makers," Kinematograph Weekly
634.3279 (15 Aug. 1970): 13.

20. Monthly Film Bulletin 29.336 (Jan. 1962): 15.

21. Cliff Richard speaking on Hollywood UK (BBC Television series, 1992).

22. Monthly Film