Tonite Let's All Make Love in London Review, Variety, 1967

(British—Documentary—Color)

A smashing time is had by all in swinging London. Brash, colourful entry has good commercial chances.

Reviewed at press screening of N.Y. Film Festival, Sept. 26, 1967.

Subtitle for this film is "Pop Concerto for Film," and that's as good a description as any of its form and content, since it's not a documentary in any ordinary sense but rather an impressionistic view of "the land of mod" as seen by a sympathetic participant.

Overture and postlude for the concerto is montage, jazzily shot, edited and scored, and in-between are seven "movements" covering such aspects of swinging Britain as pop music and painting, political protest and love for the local equivalent.

It all begins tongue-in-cheek with "the way it used to be" as represented by the changing of the guard (there's a brilliant bit of camp cinema involving a trombone player and a zoom lens), and the giggles continue with some views of London young ladies including not-so-young novelist Edna O'Brien ("most thinking people are de cadent," "marriage is such a handicap").

Then things get a bit more serious: Vanessa Redgrave sings off-key for Castro, the Rolling Stones get philosophical, Julie Christie confesses her need for "close relations" and Michael Caine thinks the new society might be trading "our morals for a mass of cultural pottage." Director Peter Whitehead has stopped making fun of his subject and is taking them at their own valuation.

But most of all it's fast-paced fun, illustrating in film terms what most of its subjects seem to be looking for: Plea sure, and Miss Christie's thesis that the cornerstone of the New London is "a good time much easier had by all." It's for this reason, combined with Whitehead's bangup technical virtuosity (and the brief on-screen moments of some of the era's most idolized mortals) that the film has a fairly strong chance of succeeding in the commercial marketplace.

Some, of course, will see it as a sociological document, heralding the fact that (as Allen Ginsberg says, voice over, in the postlude) "a new kind of man has come to his bliss." More likely it's what one of the pop painters refers to as "absolute ephemera." But either way it's a good show.

Variety

October 4, 1967