Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush

Watched this at the time (!) and pleased to find it's better than I remembered. Yes it's all about finding sex - but it has a warmth and innocence that chimes with those times. The music's pretty good too.

The continuity is appalling though - watch the boxes of shopping near the start, someone shoved in anything to hand and in the next shot, it's a different mix.

I watched this for it's nostalgia value and got to say it was very disappointing viewing. I am a big fan of 60's and 70's bawdy romps but this one was lacking in humour and dare I say any genuinely sexiness.

Dreadful film. Although considered a bit racy at the time I'm sure, it's borderline offensive in it's attitude to women.

Also I was totally confused at the age of everyone because the school kids all seemed to be played by actors in their 20s.

BUT, some really nice shots of Stevenage in colour in the 1960s and worth it for that.

So if you're into recent social history, watch it with the sound off

This romanticised look at 1967 Britain through the eyes of an awkward, spotty faced, suburban schoolboy has all the clichés familiar with this period. Psychedelic credit titles, rock music from Spencer Davies Group and Traffic, fantasy sequences, dolly birds, and lots of Carnaby Street fashions, the odd chemical substance and of course free and easy sex! Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1967), officially released on DVD for the first time by the BFI in September 2010 as part of its Flipside series, demonstrates the reason for some of the hype that has been build-up about the sixties generation.

Barry Evans, best known for his appearance in the Doctor series on the television between 1967 and 1971, plays Jamie the six former delivering groceries on a bike in Stevenage New Town with his mind firmly on the serious matter of losing his virginity. The focus of his attention involves five modern young ladies who are deemed sexually available and ripe for his seductive advances. Advances which become far more urgent when our budding stud finds out that his younger brother has already lost his virginity.

That really is the crux of the narrative but Clive Donners film does give some interesting incites into the psyche of the sixties. For example the portrayal of Jamie’s family, resolutely working class with dad’s football pools and their accompanying silence at 5 o’clock Saturday teatime and mums with her curlers which seem permanently in her hair, but in their modern new town home few elements of traditional working class culture exist. Also Jamie’s quite at home mixing with all classes of people and not forgetting the era’s attitudes to sex.

Enjoyable, but corny, the film is based on a novel by Hunter Davis, famous for writing The Beatles first biography. It’s a first person narrative with a direct address to the camera by Barry Evans that is not quite up to standard set by Michael Caine in Alfie released the year before. Great use of colour and its non-London setting makes a real change. It was suggested by certain well known critics at the time of its release that Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush would hasten the decline of western civilisation, interesting thought?

http://brianmatthews60.blogspot.com

I have been trying to catch up with films released in the sixties that I didn't see at the time, probably due to lack of money, being a teenager still at school. I have wanted to see this for some time and have to say that the anticipation was way better than the experience. A theme that is reflected in the plot!

There is and has been a lot of hype about the sixties and there were some genuinely great movies made but this is formulaic and dull. Even the music, usually a highpoint of sixties films, is mediocre, amounting to less than best of Traffic and post Steve Winwood Spencer Davis Group, certainly not their best by a long distance.

Roll on the long overdue release of 'You're A Big Boy Now'.