Jazz Boat

Let’s Get Married

Girls of the Latin Quarter

Climb Up the Wall

In the Nick

The Entertainer

Too Hot to Handle

Beat Girl

February

Anthony Newley’s gregarious career mined deeply into the British musical film industry in a year that offered no other major opportunities to young male artists beyond Tommy Steele in Light Up the Sky (barely qualifying as musical) and Adam Faith in Beat Girl, while Newley had three bites of the cherry: Jazz Boat, its sequel In the Nick, and Let’s Get Married. For some, Warwick Films’ Jazz Boat had its own identity issues, the MFB labelling it a ‘lively’ and ‘muddle-headed’ affair in which ‘The general farce and fantasy mix uneasily with the spirited caricaturing of David Lodge and Al Mulock (playing The Dancer) in the gang’, leaving Newley ‘a most ineffectual hero’ in ‘a juvenile crime story barely strong enough for a B-feature’. Newley’s biographer recognised the dichotomy, deciding that ‘its explicit and random scenes of violence made it reminiscent of Brando’s The Wild One, but in the midst of this were songs staged by Lionel Blair, turning the whole into a lesser West Side Story’. Equally confused, Kinematograph Weekly found it ‘a bit short on emotional appeal and suspense’.

Its beginnings were in a story by Rex Rienits, worked into a screenplay by John Antrobus and director Ken Hughes. Their hero, electrician Bert Harris (Newley), persuades a gang of leather-jacketed thugs that he is a cat burglar, so persuasively that he is brought in to take part in a jewel robbery. The screenplay skitters between moments of considerable violence, lingering shots of Newley smooching The Doll played by Anne Aubrey with sultry intensity, quirky humour, riotously choreographed sequences, punch-ups, and musical numbers by Joe Henderson that just about do service: a title song, the instrumental and dance number ‘I Wanna Jive Tonight’ played by Ted Heath and His Music in clubland, ‘Take It Easy’ (its lyric by Henderson and Hughes) as the gang moves through a street market causing chaos, and Newley’s especially mournful lament ‘Someone to Love’ as he wanders alone by the dockside.