Claude Whatham (1973)

I saw That’ll Be the Day twice in the 1970s – on its original release, then two years later, in a double bill with its follow-up, Michael Apted’s Stardust (1974).  Returning to Claude Whatham’s film for the first time since then, I didn’t expect to find it such an interesting concoction.  The Wikipedia entry quotes Time Out Film Guide’s dismissal of it as ‘a hugely overrated dip into the rock ‘n’ roll nostalgia bucket’.  The picture, with a screenplay by Ray Connolly, was overrated in 1973 and the soundtrack of well-known late 1950s and early 1960s tracks an important part of its commercial appeal.  But That’ll Be the Day has a sour, troubling aspect too.

In a glum prologue, a man called MacLaine (James Booth), after fighting in World War II, returns to his home in suburban England.  He’s welcomed by his wife Mary (Rosemary Leach) and their little boy Jim (Sacha Puttnam – the son of David who, with Sanford Lieberman, produced the film).  MacLaine finds working in the family’s corner shop stultifying; it’s not long before he’s walked out on Mary and Jim, having explained to the child that he’s tried and failed to ‘settle down’.  The action then leaps forward some years.  Jim, about to take his A-levels, has turned into David Essex.  Mary, still running the shop, proudly expects her son to be at university in a few months’ time but it’s obvious she’ll be disappointed.  A brief classroom sequence establishes that Jim is bright but bored:  on the morning of his history exam, en route to school, he chucks his text books into a river, to the astonishment of his friend Terry Sutcliffe (Robert Lindsay).  Jim then leaves home and heads for the seaside.

The coastal resort is not a specific but a synthesised location.  It’s the site of a Butlinesque holiday camp.  There’s a funfair.  Jim pays for his grotty rented room with money earned as a deck-chair attendant – a sinecure because it’s usually raining.  Perhaps this isn’t a single resort at all and Jim – who subsequently works as a barman and in the fairground – is drifting from place to spiritually similar place.  In any case, Claude Whatham’s purpose is to conjure up the quintessence of English seaside in the early post-war era.  Although his interest in rock ‘n’ roll is soon made clear, Jim isn’t from the outset hellbent on a performing career.  He plays the harmonica, he makes up and jots down lyrics but he shows no animation, let alone admiration, as he watches bands playing at the resort.  Jim is where he is because, like his father, he wanted to get away from something rather than get to somewhere.

The time in which the main action is taking place is synthesised too.  There are no references to current affairs.  The snippets of songs, which come thick and fast, span several years of chart singles.  That’s plausible in the seaside holiday setting – it also guards against limiting the nostalgic aims of That’ll Be the Day (evident in its title) to a narrow time window.  In one scene, a group playing an Elvis song has ‘Rock Island Line’ emblazoned on their drum kit, killing two birds with one stone.  The film is proof of how quickly, once the 1970s had arrived, the culture of immediately preceding years was recycled as pop entertainment.  But the lack of  a specific date matters in another way too.

One of the songs heard playing at the resort is Brian Hyland’s ‘Sealed with a Kiss’, a summer hit of 1962.  It doesn’t make literal sense that this is when Jim drops out of school:  if he was a six-year-old in 1945 (the age Sacha Puttnam was when the film was shot), Jim would have been taking A-levels circa 1957.  Literal sense counts for little, though.  The summer of 1962 is the right time for this story – it’s right too that, although the narrative moves forward at least three years, time stands still in the film’s pop universe.  Within a few weeks of the end of summer holidays in 1962, ‘Love Me Do’ was released:  the historical setting of That’ll Be the Day is, simply and necessarily, pre-Beatles.  A fed-up musician at the resort tells him that, in order to write your own material, you have to be American ‘nowadays’ but aspiring songsmith Jim anticipates a generation of British composer-performers that’s just around the corner.  The Beatles transformed things so much and so quickly that if the film explicitly crossed the line into 1963, it would be based in a new world that couldn’t fail to mention them.

The casting adds layers to the script.  That disgruntled musician, who twiddles on the piano and explodes on drums, is Keith Moon.  His character is part of the support band for a singer called Stormy Tempest, played by Billy Fury.   Most important, Jim strikes up a friendship with an older man, Mike, and he is Ringo Starr.  Mike, a fairground worker most of the year and a pub waiter during his annual holiday, takes Jim under his wing.  He gets him work in a bar and on the funfair, showing him how to swindle the manager (Johnny Shannon) and customers on the dodgem cars there.  He also gets Jim started with girls.  Mike doesn’t, though, sing or play an instrument or show any real interest in contemporary music.  Ringo is witty and credible in the role; he also makes you feel he’s bringing something of himself to it.  That gives poignancy to the gulf between his own mega-celebrity and his character’s perennially run-of-the-mill existence.

It didn’t seem so in 1973 but David Essex’s casting now enriches the texture too.  Although only seven years Ringo’s junior, he looks at least a generation younger:  in his mid-twenties at the time, he passes easily for an eighteen-year-old in the film’s early scenes.  Essex had had small acting jobs and released several unsuccessful singles by the time he first came to public attention playing the lead in the first West End production of Godspell, which opened in late 1971.  Just a few weeks before the release of That’ll Be the Day, in October 1973, he had his first chart hit with ‘Rock On’, his own composition.  As Stardust opened in cinemas, exactly a year later, Essex topped the UK charts with another song he’d written, the aptly named and themed ‘Gonna Make You a Star’.   He had another hit shortly afterwards with the title song from Stardust.  In That’ll Be the Day, however, he’s an actor, not a singer, and he gives a good, natural performance.   He reads his lines easily but expressively.  His face is very open to Peter Suschitzky’s camera.  And he increasingly suggests that Jim MacLaine can’t fathom why he’s so selfishly unkind.

A protagonist who combines surface charm with ruinous inconstancy is what turns the film into something harsher and more disturbing than the people behind it may have intended.  Although Essex and Ringo play well together, That’ll Be the Day is struggling for momentum while it concentrates on Jim’s partnership with Mike.  Even so, a sense of Jim’s heartlessness is already starting to emerge.  He arrives at the seaside a shy virgin.  With Mike’s initial encouragement, he’s soon the local Lothario.  He treats the girls he goes with shabbily, and is ever alert to the threat of responsibility that might affect him.  As he prepares to go to bed with Sandra (Deborah Watling), he’s spooked by the sound of a baby crying in the next room.  (If this is 1962, Jim might recently have seen John Schlesinger’s film of A Kind of Loving and taken heed of Vic Brown’s fate.)  A bit later, he aggressively refuses to make love to a young woman who’s already a mother.  He isn’t evasive only in his dealings with the opposite sex.  When a group of men beat up Mike – they may be aggrieved boyfriends of girls he’s hit on, or punters he’s cheated on the dodgems, or both – Jim’s instinct is to make himself scarce.

The attack on Mike is the last we see of him and appears to trigger Jim’s return to live with his mother.  The plot, from this point on, gathers pace.  Jim makes definite though short-lived efforts to upgrade the commercial ambitions of his mother’s business and enrols for night school.  He also starts dating Jeanette Sutcliffe (Rosalind Ayres), the hairdresser sister of Terry, who was never as clever as Jim at school but who’s now about to complete a university degree.  Here too, That’ll Be the Day mixes clichés with less expected elements to oddly convincing effect.  Jim’s mother is a familiar screen parent of her generation – pushy, scolding and envious of a son who doesn’t-know-he’s-born.  The role comes almost too easily to Rosemary Leach, and she’s saddled with some of Ray Connolly’s most clunky lines (‘Terry’s a credit to his mother … it wouldn’t be so bad if you got your hair cut’, etc).  Yet Mary MacLaine at least subverts another cliché.  She’s broad-minded enough to want Jim to continue his education rather than devote his life to the well-established family business.

Timid, almost childlike Jeanette seems an unlikely girlfriend for someone as attractive and now sexually experienced as Jim yet you can believe that her innocuousness is a refreshing relief to him – until it turns to boredom.  On the night before his wedding to Jeanette, Jim has it off with her more confident and glamorous friend Jean (Beth Morris), who’ll be bridesmaid next day.  An earlier sequence in which he accompanies Terry to his students’ union crudely presents Jim as – in the eyes of Terry’s trad-jazz-loving, posh university friends – a despised curiosity.   But Robert Lindsay is amusing:  although actually younger than David Essex, Lindsay manages to make conformist Terry middle-aged even while he’s still in school uniform.  The older generations don’t fare at all well in this film.  Mothers have too much to say; fathers, in various ways, are struck dumb.  As Mrs Sutcliffe, Daphne Oxenford has to keep unsubtly reminding everyone that her daughter’s too good for her prospective son-in-law.  Jim’s father soon scarpers.  His grandfather (James Ottoway) suffers a silencing stroke.  Mrs Sutcliffe doesn’t let her husband (Bernard Severn) get a word in edgeways.

The bare bones of Ray Connolly’s script set up Jim and his father as representatives of generational syndromes, expressed in a shared wanderlust.  The father illustrates (perfunctorily) the challenge of readjusting to prosaic normal life of men who’d seen action in World War II.  The son is a cinematically late example of a rebel without a cause:  it’s only in the closing stages that he morphs conclusively into another type, encapsulated in the Stardust tagline, ‘Show me a boy who never wanted to be a rock star and I’ll show you a liar’.  Yet the series of impulsive actions that keep changing Jim’s life and hurting other people – abandoning a ‘respectable’ future, marrying Jeanette, eventually walking out on her and their child – doesn’t, as it plays out, reduce to commercially calculating simplicity.  It’s upsetting in a different way.  In bed with Jeanette, Jim is working on some song lyrics that his wife insists on seeing.  The words are whimsical, even twee, but with a sting in the tail – something about daisies, buttercups and nettles.  Jeanette giggles she doesn’t know what he’s on about and asks why nettles.  ‘Because,’ says Jim, ‘I’m a bit of a prick’.  The next scene, he’s packing his suitcase.

In the closing sequence, Jim buys his first guitar – in effect, giving notice of Stardust.   I’d always assumed that film got made on the back of this one’s box-office success but, if so, Puttnam and Lieberson moved remarkably fast.  With only twelve months between the two release dates, production on it must have started very soon after That’ll Be the Day started taking money.  Perhaps the films were conceived as a pair from the word go.  (Ray Connolly wrote both although the directors were different.)  An unimaginative price-of-fame melodrama, Stardust had the effect of devaluing Jim McLaine’s individuality:  it was as if his destiny as an egocentric, substance-abusing rock god, explained his precocious lack of feeling for others.  When I saw the films together in 1976, I didn’t like either of them.  Watching That’ll Be the Day on television now was a welcome opportunity to see it more or less afresh, and free of the shadow of its successor.

11 August 2019