Whatever Happened to Harold Smith?
UK 1999
Reviewed by Mark Sinker
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
Sheffield, Christmas 1977. Discoboy Vince Smith loves fellow law-clerk Joanna Robinson, but daren't ask her out, although she'd like him to. Christmas festivities at the Smith household include party turns: Vince's brother Ray is an aspiring conjuror; father Harold can read minds. At an OAP birthday party, Harold stops watches with mind power - but also three pacemakers, killing their owners. National media outrage ensues. At the Roxy disco, Vince sees his mother picking up young men. Leaving in anger, he encounters punks misbehaving and falls for a girl punk. Later, he tries to become punk himself but is too naturally polite.
Harold is arrested and Vince's boss Nesbitt defends him. Joanna's punk boyfriend besieges the Robinson household and Vince realises the two girls he fancies are the same person. To prove Harold's mind powers are made up, Nesbitt asks Joanna's father Peter, a university lecturer, to run tests. The powers prove real. Peter starts publicising Harold as the new messiah. More media attention follows, until a television talk show doorsteps the Smith family. Harold - recognising the harm being done - denies his powers. Joanna tells Vince she doesn't want to see him anymore. He ambushes her ex-boyfriend in order to win back her love but she angrily spurns him. The ex-boyfriend beats him up until Harold steps in with his powers. Vince wins Joanna over at last by disco dancing.
Review
Peter Hewitt - director of Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey and The Borrowers, both most excellent in their way - will surely never make a movie of profound intellectual substance. But he may also never make one that isn't fun, such is his obsessive care with certain details (setting up and delivering gags, getting the look and pop-culture references precise). Whatever Happened to Harold Smith? is a quirky original love story, set in a recreated punk era at once scrupulously exact and dreamily imaginary, telling of working-class wannabe punk Vince Smith's shy attraction to the 'real' (though middle-class) punk Joanna Robinson.
Scripted as a magical-realist fable about the corrosive effects of fame, Whatever screens as a discombobulated series of set-pieces, blithely unconcerned whether any given character has a coherent purpose scene-to-scene. For example, the trendy-lefty but uptight Robinson household has a sex-education tableau and a confessing-infidelities scene, both painfully funny, yet no attempt is made to synchronise the scenes emotionally. All that matters in any scene is the gag concept in play, as if all Hewitt's head has room for is big- and small-screen moments: clichés to subvert, classic scenes to parody, canonic camera timing to machine-tool.
Equally, Hewitt's notion of a radical cultural upheaval seems to be Rod Hull's puppet Emu's assault on interviewer Michael Parkinson, although if this is a limitation it still gives him an appropriate perspective on punk, which was obsessed by media (including its own mediation). So it's perfectly appropriate the media should play such a pivotal part in the dominant subplot of nice Harold Smith's unintentionally fatal telepathic powers becoming a national nine-day wonder. A swirl of referential fragments (Saturday Night Fever, Top Cat, half-forgotten television beer ads, Billy Liar) combine with real-life clip-quotes (Uri Geller spoon-bending, the Hai Karate ad) and clever recreations, with former household media names playing themselves covering the telepathy story (such as Jan Leeming, Angela Rippon, John Craven).
Although made on location in Sheffield, with the help of the kind of EU funding that usually feeds into the more constricting modes of worthy realism, the movie is art-directed towards dream territory from the outset. For example, much unobtrusive care has gone into the colour co-ordination of stacked plastic beer crates and other seemingly invisible backdrop textures, quite at odds with the real mid-70s Britain which had a stifling shabbiness now very hard to imagine, let alone recreate.
Equally anachronistic technologically is the Steadicam simulcast which forms the film's climax, where a television panel discussion is suddenly cross-cut with a live foot-in-the-door confrontation. In addition, talk-show host Roland Thornton, played by present-day television revue-satire The Fast Show's Mark Williams, is a cartoon cameo more malignantly volatile and leeringly intelligent than anyone was ever allowed to be on 70s television.
Actually, it's intriguing and revealing that Hewitt's sensibility in this film should jibe so closely with The Fast Show's. The latter's self-referential, class-canny smarts are the evolutionary end product of both the best and the most compromised legacy of punk's influence on television since the 70s. Clearly, little remains here of punk's angry will to transform the world, but occasionally, beneath the accuracy and generosity Hewitt directs even at the story's most monstrously teasable targets (such as Joanna's father the lecturer), there is an awareness of the brooding co-dependent hostility between ordinary showbiz performers and their alienated yet complicit audiences.
However, this acknowledgement is itself 90s schtick. Punk demanded better real life, not least to ensure less oppressively limiting television. So the concept of television invading real life was always something of a founding punky folk-panic. Today it's a staple of comic perception, setting the very rules that Whatever Happened to Harold Smith? abides by in such a deftly likeable, throwaway style.
Credits
- Director
- Peter Hewitt
- Producer
- Ruth Jackson
- Screenplay
- Ben Steiner
- Director of Photography
- David Tattersall
- Editor
- Martin Walsh
- Production Designer
- Gemma Jackson
- Music
- Rupert Gregson-Williams
- ©Intermedia Film Equities Limited
- Production Companies
- an Intermedia Films/October
- Films presentation, in association with the Arts Council of England of a West Eleven Films production
- Arts Council of England
- Yorkshire Media Production Agency
- Part funded by the European Regional Development Fund
- Executive Producers
- Guy East
- Nigel Sinclair
- For Intermedia Films
- Will Evans
- Philip Rose
- Tim Haslam
- Matthew Paine
- Paul Davis
- Nick Drake
- Kathy Goodman
- Andy Mayson
- For West Eleven Films
- Mary Ann Lutyens
- Production Co-ordinator
- Isobel Thomas
- Production Manager
- Blackpool Unit:
- Chris Webb
- TV Show Studio Manager
- Stuart Bailey
- Location Managers
- Emma Pill
- Additional Crew:
- Mark Herbert
- Blackpool Unit:
- Darren Holt
- Post-production Supervisor
- Miranda Jones
- Assistant Directors
- Mary Soan
- Josh Robertson
- Ben Howard
- Script Supervisors
- Angela Noakes
- Additional Crew:
- June McDonald
- Casting
- Nina Gold
- Additional Crew Director of Photography
- John Pardue
- Camera Operator
- Philip Sindall
- Additional Crew Operator
- Jeremy Gee
- Video Camera Operators
- Additional Crew:
- Gary Wraith
- Derek Pascoe
- Steadicam Operator
- Keith Sewell
- Video Services/Effects
- Justin Owen
- Visual Effects
- Supervisor:
- Paul Riddle
- Producer:
- Matt Plummer
- 2D Compositors
- Simon Terry
- Jim Bowers
- Studio Manager
- Pete Hanson
- Technical Operations Manager
- Steve MacPherson
- Chief Engineer
- Ian Chisholm
- Film Recording
- Simon Burley
- Visual/CGI Effects
- Double Negative
- Physical Effects
- Supervisor:
- Ian Rowley
- Technicians:
- Linda Haywood
- Stewart Rawson
- Flying Wire Effects
- Kevin Matthews
- Graphics
- Peter Thompson
- Motion Control Camera
- Ian Menzies
- Art Directors
- David Warren
- Additional Crew:
- John Billington
- Costume Designer
- Marie France
- Costume Supervisor
- Ann Taylor-Cowan
- Wardrobe Master
- Day Murch
- Wardrobe Mistress
- Marnie Ormiston
- Make-up/Hair Supervisor
- Darren Phillips
- Make-up Artists
- Sally Collins
- Mandy Gold
- Titles
- The Useful Companies
- Music Supervisors
- Maggie Rodford
- Matt Biffa
- Music Editors
- Twydor Davis
- Score:
- Richard Robson
- Music Recordist/Mixer
- Mal Luker
- Programming/Synths Recording
- Steve Jablonsky
- Synths Recording
- Gregg Silk
- Soundtrack
- "Whatever Happened to?" by Pete Shelley, Richard Boon, performed by The Buzzcocks; "Night Fever" by Barry Gibb, Robin Gibb, Maurice Gibb, performed by (1) The Bee Gees, (2) The Bee Gees, Janus Stark; "Handling the Big Jets" by Chris Payne, performed by The Members; "Big Spender" by Cy Coleman, Dorothy Fields, arranged by Graham Preskett, performed by Lulu; "I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday" by Roy Wood, performed by Roy Wood and Wizzard; "Right Back Where We Started From" by Pierre Richard Roman, J. Vincent Edwards, performed by Maxine Nightingale; "Left Bank Two" by Wayne Hill; "Underneath the Arches" by Bud Flanagan, performed by John Higgins; "I Love to Love" by Philo Robinson, James Bolden, performed by Tina Charles; "Boogie Nights" by Rod Temperton, performed by Heatwave; "You to Me Are Everything" by Ken Golde, Michael Denne, performed by The Real Thing; "Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn't Have Fallen in Love With?)" by Pete Shelley, performed by The Buzzcocks; "Anarchy in the UK" by Glen Matlock, Paul Cook, Steve Jones, John Lydon, performed by The Sex Pistols; "White Riot" by Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, performed by (1) The Clash, (2) Michael Legge; "Peaches" by Hugh Cornwell, Jean-Jacques Burnel, Dave Greenfield, Jet Black, performed by Charlie Hunnam; "Anything You Want" by/performed by Crap Attack; "No More Heroes" by Hugh Cornwell, Jean-Jacques Burnel, Dave Greenfield, Jet Black, performed by The Stranglers; "Pommie" by Reg Tilsley, performed by The London Big Sound; "Raw Power", "Personality Breakdown" by Gizz Butt, performed by Janus Stark; "theme from Starsky & Hutch" by Thomas W. Scott, arranged by Graham Preskett
- Choreography
- Litza Bixler
- Production Sound Mixer
- John Midgley
- Additional Crew Sound Recordist
- Steve Phillips
- Re-recording Mixers
- Tim Cavagin
- Steve Single
- Supervising Sound Editor
- Ian Wilson
- Dialogue Editor
- Twydor Davis
- ADR
- Mixers:
- Ed Colyer
- Trevor Swanscott
- David Humphries
- Editor:
- Howard Halsall
- Foley
- Artists:
- Pauline Griffiths
- Jenny Lee-Wright
- Mixer:
- John Bateman
- Editor:
- Peter Christelis
- Stunt Co-ordinators
- Ray De-Haan
- Peter Brayham
- Tortoises
- Sue Clark
- Timbertops
- Cast
- Tom Courtenay
- Harold Smith
- Michael Legge
- Vince Smith
- Laura Fraser
- Joanna Robinson
- Stephen Fry
- Doctor Peter Robinson
- Charlotte Roberts
- Lucy Robinson
- Amanda Root
- Margaret Robinson
- Lulu
- Irene Smith
- David Thewlis
- Keith Nesbitt
- Charlie Hunnam
- Daz
- Matthew Rhys
- Ray Smith
- James Corden
- Walter Bennett
- Rosemary Leach
- Madge, Harold's mother
- Charles Simon
- Oobie
- Mark Williams
- Roland Thornton
- John Higgins
- The Reverend Anthony Cooper
- Keith Chegwin
- Hugh Pimm
- Jeremy Child
- Doctor Bannister
- Patrick Monckton
- Peter Pringle
- Andy Rashleigh
- Sergeant Tom Higgins
- Iain Rogerson
- North Now presenter
- Rebecca Hill
- Janita Appa
- disco girls
- Dave Cooke
- boyfriend
- Richenda Carey
- Mary Blackcottage
- Janus Stark
- The Clique
- Gizz Butt
- Clique lead singer
- Andrew Pincham
- Clique drummer
- Swapan Nandi
- Clique bass player
- Matt Biffa
- Clique manager
- Angela Rippon
- John Craven
- Alan Whicker
- Jan Leeming
- themselves
- David Law
- Charlie Wathen
- Sharon Holland
- Harold Smith followers
- Jim Barclay
- Simon Holmes
- Peter Speedwell
- Simon Scott
- journalists
- Robert Curbishley
- Jonah Russell
- Ian Kirkby
- policemen
- Anna Keaveney
- woman in street
- Dick Ward
- man in street
- Certificate
- 15
- Distributor
- United International Pictures (UK) Ltd
- 8,631 feet
- 95 minutes 54 seconds
- Dolby digital
- Colour by
- DeLuxe