London in all its 1960s Swinging glory is what Smashing Time offers, in what’s meant to be a satire on the time and the place but is more a jaunt around the zeitgeist’s tourist landmarks strapped to some weak songs and very feeble comedy. I kid you not, there is a banana skin gag.
Rita Tushingham and Lynn Redgrave play Brenda and Yvonne, a pair of friends from “up north” who arrive in London determined to locate Carnaby Street and plug straight into the scene. Instead they find themselves penniless, having been robbed the minute they arrived in the capital.
From here bullish, stupid Yvonne and timid, smart Brenda’s paths diverge slightly, allowing a twin-track journey through mid-1960s London – an art event that turns into an anarcho-surrealist bunfight, a boutique selling Edwardian revival clobber (think Sgt Pepper), a flea market, a posh nightclub where old guys ply girls like Brenda and Yvonne with champagne, the groovy King’s Road, a movie premiere with Twiggy and John Lennon (lookey-likeys) in attendance, a counter-cultural pop happening.
Most obviously there’s Michael York’s “yeh, baby” photographer Tom Wabe who is pivotal in the lives of both Brenda and Yvonne – both eventually become “faces” on the scene – but also on later culture. If you’re looking for a template for Austin Powers, look no further. Wabe has the same hair, the same vocabulary and the same ingratiating manner as Mike Myers’s creation.
The name Wabe is a little joke by writer George Melly, whose book Revolt into Style, about the youth culture of the era, is much better than this screenplay full of jokes seemingly intended only for Melly himself. Like the character names out of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky – Wabe, Gimble (Irene Handl), Brillig (Anna Quayle), Mome-Rath (Ian Carmichael) and Tove (Jeremy Lloyd). Brenda and Yvonne are joke names too – it’s what the satirical magazine Private Eye used to call the Queen (Brenda) and her sister Princess Margaret (Yvonne).
It’s a good film for people who like to spot character actors of the era. Arthur Mullard, David Lodge, Cardew Robinson and Peter Jones also turn up and all are good value. If you’re good with the freeze frame you might also notice musicians of the future David Essex and Yes guitarist Steve Howe, both uncredited.
There’s an argument to be made that this is actually a musical, though the ten songs (sung by Tushingham and Redgrave) are mostly sung offscreen and aren’t particularly good, apart from the one that propels Yvonne to pop stardom, with its lyric – “I can’t sing but I’m young/I can’t do a thing but I’m young/I’m a fool/But I’m cool/Don’t put me down” – which are as on-the-money as the tune (I suspect this was the one song that wasn’t written by Melly and John Addison, who have the screen credit).
It’s a painfully unsophisticated film, which relies on slapstick for much of its humour, with not one but two pie fights straight from the silent era. But there’s a historical-record aspect to to it that makes it valuable and the performances of both Tushingham and Redgrave are strong and invest both Yvonne and Brenda with more warmth than is in Melly’s script (the notoriously complicated Melly was himself from “up north” so maybe there’s some self-loathing involved).
Desmond Davis’s direction is efficient, and he’d worked with both Tushingham and Redgrave before, on his debut, Girl with Green Eyes. For all its deficiences, this is a good looking film, with bright lighting that makes the colours in the many garish sets really ping. For added oomph the Kino Lorber DVD linked to below – an HD master of a 4K scan – really makes it look its best.
Smashing Time – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
