Strong and Moving!

just watch it!

I was totally surprised at how great this film.You could feel your paranoia rise as the film went on and as you gradually learned the details of the real situation.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Michael Winner might well have felt like insuring his nascent directing career when he received the script for this pop exploitation flick. Feebly constructed as a vehicle for Billy Fury, the agenda underlying Play it Cool is painfully obvious from the outset – Fury was being groomed as a British Elvis and the movie career was just one more box to be ticked. There's no doubt he had the looks and the voice, if not, perhaps, songs of sufficiently high quality (there's only one truly memorable number on offer here). He just can't act. Not even a little, little bit. Fury fans should simply skip the plot and go straight to the musical numbers. Sorry, did I say 'plot'? My mistake.Fury's acting skills may be wanting, but worse by far is the sight of British comedy stalwart Richard Wattis mugging it up as Billy's ever-so-slightly camp manager. Good fortune intervenes and removes Wattis' utterly resistible character from the plot after about twenty minutes. By coincidence, that's the point at which the storyline seizes up. Ah yes, the storyline. That needn't detain us long. Fury (as the plausibly-named Billy Universe) and his band are en route to a pop music contest in Europe. They get no further than the airport where they become involved in some lightweight shenanigans involving an heiress who's aiming to give daddy (Dennis Price) the slip and marry no-good pop louse Larry Grainger (Maurice Kaufmann). That's about the sum of it. From Gatwick Airport, our heroes decamp to a barely recognisable Soho where begins an interminable run of sequences as Fury and co pursue Grainger through various nightclubs – a thinly disguised excuse for some mimed performances by the likes of Helen Shapiro, Shane Fenton and Bobby (Rubber Ball) Vee. And of course, Fury himself, whose best moments are when he's in his rock 'n' roll comfort zone. Badly executed though it may be, it's hard to cultivate any genuine dislike for this movie as it's all so well-intentioned, and Fury fans will rightly appreciate it as the best surviving film document of a true British rock and roll icon.

A GREAT Movie for it's time and I still enjoy it now. As a teenager in the 60's I liked all the pop stars films .BILLY FURY, Elvis, Cliff .. I have been a life long FAN of BILLY and I am insulted by the needless comments by a gentleman from Hollywood, CA .. Billy Fury wrote his own songs and sang them to a packed audience and his Vocals and Acting in this Film are impeccable and so are his Co stars. His name lives because he was BRITAINS FIRST Rock'n'Roller. Yes it's true to say Billy Admired Elvis but Billy had his own style and was a big hit in Britain, it is documented that Elvis thought Billy was FANtastic. I have 3 granddaughters who enjoyed watching PLAY IT COOL in fact they play it quite a lot , so they can't be wrong as they are bought up with modern music. I loved the film , every part of it and I would Highly recommend anyone to watch it who will see it for what it is. A Legend Movie .. regards Cathy

To the critic of the film Play It Cool starring the One & Only Billy Fury - Billy was the British King Of Rock'n'Roll and this film was appreciated by thousands of his fans (and still is). The storyline may be weak by todays standards but to have Our Billy on film for posterity is BILLYant. Your comments are disrespectful to Billy and his many fans worldwide. You don't know what you are talking about....and who will remember you 23 years after you have died! By the way, he's not died - he's just stopped breathing and will live on in the hearts of so many. Take a look at www.billy fury.com (Billy Fury - The Story) and see just how popular Billy Fury still is and join his fans'n'friends on the message board - I dare you! Rock On Like Fury!

With 1962 being a strange time for rock 'n' roll in both America and England, it's a wonder that "Play It Cool" is as entertaining as it is. British rock star Billy Fury plays an Elvis wannabee named Billy Universe who curls his lip and moans just like his hero, but exaggerates his hand movements to the point where he looks like a spastic Bobby Darin. When Billy and his wacky band members get stranded in London with an heiress who's looking for her no-good boyfriend, they make the rounds of the city's pubs and clubs, stumbling upon a place where a trio is singing the squarest music imaginable, then heading on to a spot called The Twist where everybody's twisting (the latest dance craze when "Play It Cool" was being filmed, but stone dead by the time the film was released), then dropping in on a Chinese-themed restaurant called the Lotus Club where pop star Helen Shapiro is crooning in front of a phalanx of violinists. A visit to another club finds American teen idol Bobby Vee (who began his career as a Buddy Holly sound-alike) spooning drivel in front of another bank of violins. Through it all, Billy Fury gets to sing a handful of songs, including a sappy ballad, a twist, an uptempo number called "I Think You're Swell" and a fairly good rocker called "Play It Cool." In other words, this movie is musically all over the place, because the producers were trying to please everybody at a time when the music was rapidly changing. To bind all the musical interludes together, there are lots of little subplots and shots of Billy and his boys running through Gatwick Airport and Houston Station (more than a year before the Beatles did the same thing in "A Hard Day's Night"), but in the end it doesn't add up to much simply because the music is so uniformly unmemorable. Billy Fury is a sympathetic presence, but perhaps the most intriguing artist in "Play It Cool," at least for Americans, is teenage star Helen Shapiro, who sings two numbers, including one of her singles, "I Don't Care." America never really had anything like this bouffant contralto, unless you combine Annette Funicello with the foghorn voice of Timi Yuro. Helen is one of the most awkward performers I've ever seen (more so here than in her film debut, "It's Trad, Dad"), and yet I couldn't take my eyes off her strange beauty. Her career was fading fast by the time she appeared in "Play It Cool," but she's probably the best reason to watch it.