Videodrone MOD Movies: Dave Clark's 'Wild Weekend'

"Having a Wild Weekend" (Warner Archive), the Dave Clark Five's answer to "A Hard Day's Night," has a title that suggests the knock-about fun and goofy banter of The Beatles on film. To some extent you'll find that here. The five boys live in what appears to be, at various times, an old church, an abandoned farmhouse, a run-down manor, and a rummage sale in a school gymnasium (thus the trampoline in the middle of the room), but instead of playing music, they play stunt men and extras in a beef industry ad campaign branded "Meat for Go," which are conspicuously absent of any actual meat in the ads. What the ads seem to sell is the blond charm of poster girl Dinah (Barbara Ferris) and the puckish spirit of five mod young men leaping goofily around her.

Dave Clark is the ostensible lead as Steve, one of the stunt men and the only member of quintet to get something approaching a distinctive character (the other four boys goof around the margins), and he kicks off the story by driving off the commercial in a sports car with a willing Dinah. She's the bubbly starlet as free spirit next to Clark's brooding would-be rebel Steve, but Clark has, shall we say, a deficit of screen presence, let alone personality or charisma. Ferris effortlessly dominates by sheer personality and energy. Maybe that's why Dave Clark never made another film.

Or maybe it's because "Having a Wild Weekend" is not the happy-go-lucky romp the gag-laden opening promises.

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