Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

For 1963 this musical seems dated. Rock and Roll arrived in the mid fifties but a musical with actual melodic melody and literate lyrics in 1963 was definitely a throw-back. To be fair it probably aspired to nothing more than giving the audience a painless dose of escapism so long as they didn't ask any awkward questions; for example in about the second reel the boys are in the bus on a road in France which is about three times as wide as any road in France that I've ever driven on, clearly shot on the back-lot at Elstree. When they meet the girls who are in a clapped-out car there is a sequence lasting a good ten minutes in which they try to persuade the girls to ride with them which includes a song/dance. During ALL THIS TIME the road is completely EMPTY: No pedestrians, no bicycles, no cars, no vans, no trucks, no lorries, no buses, no coaches. Nothing. In the middle of the day yet. If you can live with this and don't object to the central plot point - a wealthy girl on the run from a controlling parent - being lifted straight out of It Happened One Night, then you may well enjoy this.

Summer Holiday has the distinction of being the first film I saw on TV which I had previously seen during its first run at the cinema. That little black and white TV picture wasn't half as good as the big widescreen colourful film at the cinema.But the film was always fun. Naive fun, to be sure, but fun nevertheless. An undemanding plot carries just enough dramatic tension to hold together the travelogue across Europe, the leads perform adequately, and the songs contain several classics (The Next Time is one of the all-time great ballads, and the Parthenon setting does it spectacular justice).Cliff's movies were, for the most part, entertaining, and an important part of a career where he has always tended to keep moving. A shame that his most recent move has been providing free holiday accommodation for Teflon Tony and Cruella.

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??