WHATEVER HAPPENED TO HAROLD SMITH?/ ***

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Whatever Happened to Harold Smith?

***

Rated on a 4-star scale
Screening venue: Odeon (Liverpool City Centre)
Released in the UK by UIP on March 10, 2000; certificate 15; 96 minutes; country of origin UK; aspect ratio 1.85:1

Directed by Pete Hewitt; produced by Ruth Jackson. Written by Ben Steiner. Photographed by David Tattersall; edited by Martin Walsh.

CAST.....
Michael Legge..... Vince Smith
Tom Courtenay..... Harold Smith
Laura Fraser..... Joanna Robinson
Stephen Fry..... Doctor Peter Robinson
Charlotte Roberts..... Lucy Robinson
Amanda Root..... Margaret Robinson
Lulu..... Irene Smith

There are some basic facts about the 1970s that many movies have trouble understanding -- they took place in reality, and they took place on earth. If I've seen one, I've seen a dozen films and shows whose characters run around alive with the knowledge they're in The Seventies, squeeze the word "groovy" into almost every sentence, wear huge polyester garments and disco-dance at every given opportunity.

Perhaps I'm exaggerating, but my point is an excellent one -- it was a very loud decade, but not as loud as recent pop culture is making it out to be. Normally the misrepresentation irks me, but "Whatever Happened to Harold Smith?", a film chock-full of cheesy retro designs, brought a smile to my face. It's fun because it goes wildly over-the-top at every turn. 1977-1978 is therefore the perfect setting, especially this preposterous vision of the period; after all, is there any other recent era so notorious for being so tawdry?

Two stories run concurrently throughout the film. One is the coming-of-age tale of Vince Smith (Michael Legge), a teenage legal clerk who is beginning to wonder if he really does identify with the disco scene, and who has fallen in love with an attractive young colleague, Joanna (Laura Fraser). Joanna is a strange girl, I think -- she's usually sweet, but has rash mood swings, getting angry at people out of the blue, or asking them provocative questions such as "Are you a virgin?" But she's gorgeous, so never mind.

Meanwhile, Vince's father, Harold (Tom Courtenay), is attracting nationwide publicity. After seeing Uri Geller bend spoons on television, you see, he decided to utilise his own magical talents, which include the ability to stop watches. When he performed this trick at a nursing home, he accidentally stopped some of the resident's pacemakers, and is under suspicion for murder.

The plot threads eventually come together in a scene that doesn't have any thematic resonance at all, and exists only to get us tapping our toes to the Bee Gees' song "Night Fever". But somehow, for all its lack of sense, "Whatever Happened to Harold Smith?" never seems bad, and comes across as more of a screw-loose send-up of bad movies. The bizarre comic set-pieces, which include Stephen Fry stripping to give his daughter a "birds and the bees" talk, are pumped so full of visual histrionics that we have to laugh -- partly from embarrassment, partly because we're impressed at the film's audacious lack of taste.

So everything that's going on is silly. That's a one-joke premise. The reason it doesn't get annoying or boring is that the three lead performances follow the essential rule of comedy -- nine times out of ten, it has to be played straight. Legge, Courtenay and Fraser (who was so terrible in last year's "Virtual Sexuality") are all straightforward and down-to-earth. Their surroundings are going mad, but they don't join in; they stand outside them looking bemused, which is a perfectly sensible reaction.

Normally people tell me I'm too critical a viewer. In the case of this film, though, I'm going to be getting letters and emails asking how I could possibly defend such nonsense. But first of all, I do not defend it. I praise it. And to paraphrase famed New Yorker critic Pauline Kael, movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we might as well not attend the cinema. "Whatever Happened to Harold Smith?" is not great trash, but it is good trash. Sometimes that's harder to pull off than good art.

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