Saul Swimmer’s Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter
is a strange and rather downbeat showcase for the pop group Herman’s Hermits, following
the general blueprint of A Hard Day’s
Night and others but with limited sense of exuberance, almost seeming inclined
to hold the pop music racket at arm’s length. The peculiarly conceived plot revolves
around a racing greyhound (the Mrs. Brown of the title) owned by Peter Noone’s Herman,
he and his four friends (largely interchangeable in their blandness, physically
and otherwise) seemingly keeping the band going mainly as a way of financing
the dog’s activities; when it goes missing they return to their various menial
jobs, apparently not much caring. The film feels somewhat depressing from its
very first shots, driving through a horrifyingly derelict Manchester: a scene
in a raucous local pub built around an old-timer singing My Old Man’s a Dustman
carries much more spirit than its tentative ventures into “Swinging Sixties”
territory, which carry an air of merely hoping to get out alive. The film’s
diffidence extends to its romantic inventions: Herman barely acknowledges Tulip,
the neighbourhood girl who openly pines for him, falling instead for an out-of-his-league
model, but in the end the model is working in Italy and thereby seemingly
unattainable, so it seems Herman will probably settle for Tulip anyway, as long
as she realizes she may be cooking and cleaning for five men (no problem!) The
songs are tuneful enough (There’s a Kind of Hush is likely to be the
most recognizable nowadays, largely by virtue of the Carpenters’ cover) but it
doesn’t say much for the Hermits’ legacy that the two musical highlights focus on
others: a silly song about the joys of selling fruit and vegetables performed
by Stanley Holloway, and a plaintive number about love being mainly for the
young, somewhat reminiscent of Gigi’s I Remember It Well.
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