Mrs. Brown You’ve Got A Lovely Daughter (UK, 1968) 95 min color DIR: Saul Swimmer. SCR: Norman Thaddeus Vane. PROD: Allen Klein. MUSIC: Mickie Most, Ron Goodwin, John Paul Jones. DOP: Jack Hildyard. CAST: Herman’s Hermits (Peter Noone, Karl Green, Keith Hopwood, Derek Leckenby), Barry Whitwam, Stanley Holloway, Mona Washbourne, Lance Percival, Marjorie Rhodes, Sheila White, Sarah Caldwell, Hugh Futcher, Drewe Henley, Avis Bunnage, John Sharp, Lynda Baron, Joan Hickson. (MGM)
A sign that the cycle of pictures featuring British Invasion groups was running on fumes in just four years after A Hard Day’s Night, this vehicle for Herman’s Hermits relies on the old B-movie plot of the boys racing dogs in order to make money to finance their group: a variation on a theme that was already beaten into the ground in 1940s second features. Sheila White from The Ghost Goes Gear is once again the love interest. While this MGM production is handsome (the cobblestones are a lot cleaner than those in Gerry Marsden’s reminisces in Ferry Cross the Mersey), the movie is just too big, thereby too empty for such a slim idea. Once more, we see people eat breakfast in fast motion, and Mona Washbourne is cast as a matronly type … but here she also sings in an unbelievable number in which she and Stanley Holloway embarrass themselves trying to be “hip”. Didn’t someone think the movie had enough music? Herman’s Hermits are featured in “It’s Nice to Be Out in the Morning”, “There’s a Kind of Hush” (in perhaps the film’s best scene after Peter Noone walks Ms. White home), and of course, the title tune. This was the second and last Herman’s Hermits vehicle, after starring in Hold On!, which grafted rock and roll with the space race. I haven’t seen it, but apparently, it’s worse.