Watch Summer Holiday For Free

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Good start, but then it gets ruined

As Good As It Gets

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

Summer Holiday finds British pop sensation Cliff Richard cast as a London bus driver who along with three of his mates take a London double-decker bus to Europe and outfit it as a sleep in. If it's successful they want to get a franchise for a fleet of them. Nice entrepreneurship if nothing else. His mates just happen to be the members of the band who back him up.There are so many numbers in this film that it would qualify as a full blown musical very much along the lines of what Colonel Tom Parker was arranging for Elvis Presley to star in. Personally after seeing two of Richard's films I think he's stylistically more like Ricky Nelson or Frankie Avalon. But the film is an Elvis type musical with a British twist.Richard's a pleasant enough singer, but Presley beats him as an actor by light years. In his second film the very serious Expresso Bongo, Richard had his best role as essentially playing himself.The budding entrepreneurs pick up Lauri Peters who was a performer herself and running away from her domineering mother Madge Ryan. If I had a mother like Ryan I'd run away too. Ryan chews two or three sofa beds in her performance, one of the most outrageously overacted I've ever seen. Second to her is Ron Moody who plays a French mime whom the boys pick up while making their trip from France to Athens. The presence of these two people show that like Presley in the USA, Cliff Richard's managers are making sure he gets good support in his films.

Cliff is a great singer, always has been always will. When i first heard from my Nan that he made movies in the sixties i didn't know what to think, but now that i have seen it, WOW! Cliff is surrounded by great talent and great people. Melvyn Hayes as Cyril, Teddy Green as Steve and of course Una Stubbs as sandy, what a great cast.Cliff always comes out on top and he certainly did with this one as it was a box office smash in 1963. Good on them. Many people do not like cliff as a singer and say oh my god not in films as well but how many of them have watched Summer Holiday over the years and how many of those people saw it as a kid, it annoys me that Cliff is criticised over many things, such as he isn't married so he must be gay!, it is a better lifestyle for Cliff as he hasn't got a family to think about, he can go on tour and has no ties.Summer Holiday is a great musical comedy family movie, i love it and i know many other people do too.

After doing up a London double-decker as a sort of mobile home, Don and his friends set out to travel across Europe for a fantastic summer holiday. Along the way they pick up a group of English girls and a young boy. However when the young boy turns out to be a missing female celebrity the group find themselves getting into many adventures as her agents try to keep her 'missing' for as long as possible to get her the headlines. Meanwhile, Don has his own problems as the self confessed 'bachelor boy' finds himself falling in love.Given that the cassette soundtrack to this film was officially 'the first album I ever bought', I took the chance (for the first time since then!) to watch the actual film again. With the thinnest of connections to the Olympics (the group's destination is Athens) this film was screened during the day of the opening ceremony of the 2004 games and I took the opportunity to video it for later viewing. The film was pretty much what I expected it to be in that it was cheesy, silly and not that good – just what you would expect from a pop musical of the period that aimed to be nothing more than inoffensive family fun. The plot is basically a road trip with a very obvious romance acting as the driving force for a series of amusing antics and pop songs. None of it is very good but it is reasonably OK and is worth seeing as a piece of fun.The antics are not that funny but they have a great sense of 'clean fun' – hard to describe but easy to get into if you are in the mood for it. Of course, modern, more cynical audiences will find it a major turn off but it is quite fun in a very basic sense. Likewise the songs are hardly great and can be best described as 'clean' and 'wholesome' with the odd one being memorable or catchy but mostly them just doing the job and nothing more. The cast also fit with this 'clean fun' family ideal and the plot never dares suggest that a bus load of young men and woman would do anything alone in cramped rooms around Europe! Heck – one of the guys even complains about the number of girls on the bus – sorry? what?! They fall into pure, clean love and that's about it, with the cast never doing more than smiling. Complain all you want though, about his appeal to older fans, but Cliff Richard was a consistent presence in the UK charts and here he shows that he has a real light, natural charisma that suits the film perfectly – he is hardly giving a great performance but he is well suited. Hayes provides some laughs but the rest of the guys are a bit lame while the women are represented with sexless and poor performances from the flat Peters and the 'too smiley by half' Stubbs.So no, it isn't a good film but it is good, clean family fun that may suit you for an afternoon viewing. The songs, the tone and the cast are all cheap and light – not adding anything to the thin plot or material but they suit a film that tries to be nothing more than family fun and, as such, it is rather enjoyable even if I should really know better.

I first saw this flick not in a theater, but on TV back in the late 1970s. It was a very pleasant musical (for what it is), and it shows the so-called 'carefree' days when such films would really matter!I understand that a soundtrack album was released in the USA! I have been looking for that record for YEARS! Would anybody part with their copy??