I really only watched this early 60's British musical in remembrance of the recently deceased actress Una Stubbs as I'm not a fan of the film's anodyne star Cliff Richard. I guess most countries of the time produced their own "home-grown Elvis" in the wake of the U. S. sensation's success and Richard was the United Kingdom's entry. Young, slim, handsome and with a pleasant singing voice, but distinctly lacking in on-screen charisma or personality, this film was an attempt to break him in the States but that exercise in taking coals to Newcastle failed with the unfortunate timing of the movie's release coinciding as it did with the assassination of President Kennedy which threw the nation into mourning. Not so the U. K. however, where the film was a smash hit.
Richard leads his gang of merry pranksters through Continental Europe in a customised red London Corporation bus for no strong reason I can discern. Along the way he and his three goofy friends, including the rather camp Melvyn Hayes, somewhat inappropriately playing Miss Stubbs' boy-friend, pick up Una and her two singing girl-friends and next collect a stowaway, Laurie Peters, who just happens to be an American singing star on the run from her overbearing, publicity-seeking old mum and her lackey manager. Cliff's backing group The Shadows are occasionally seen in the background, again for no particular reason. I can only think that the reason why they couldn't play Cliff's mates themselves was because they were one too many or just couldn't act.
Overloaded with songs, some of them awful and a few of them at best pleasant, like the title track and familiar Richard hits "The Next Time" (actually a straight copy of Bobby Vee's "Run To Him"), the irritatingly singalong "Bachelor Boy" (the aim of which, he has indeed achieved) and the best of them, the bright, catchy "Dancin' Shoes", there are all the usual misunderstandings and cases of mistaken identities you'd expect in a light family entertainment feature as this. A pre-Fagin Ron Moody makes an appearance in an embarrassingly overlong mime-skit, David Kossof pops up as a condescending magistrate and there are other cringeworthy encounters including a mildly creepy one where a dirty-minded Richard reimagines an assortment of old ladies and young schoolgirls as sexy pin-ups and later run-ins with a stereotypical horde of Yugoslavian rural peasants and the Austrian border guard.
Peter Yates, who would go on to much better things, basically just follows the bus and tries to enliven things every now and again with some trick photography and choreographed dance numbers but the overall feeling conveyed here is one of forced niceness, for want of a better description. The acting is insipid at best although Miss Stubbs, for the record, displays more personality than most and is underused but on the whole, popular as it was at the time, "Summer Holiday" is one vacation I'd rather have missed.
