Toomorrow people, yesterday's sound
POP SCIENCE fantasy has been tried before usually with dismal effect. So I suppose we should be grateful that Toomorrow (A), Odeon’s general release next week, has made a better than average try at getting the idea to go.
Despite its outer-space jiggery-pokery, its thin and dated musical score and its Noddy plot, this Technicolor pantomime produced Bond man Harry Saltzman with Don Kirshner doesn’t do anyone any harm, and certainly has its entertaining moments.
My only regret is that director-writer Val Guest didn’t latch on to the fact that his film is Saturday morning pictures stuff and do the job properly for the kiddiwinks.
FINANCE
The plot gyrates around four students at the London College of Arts who form a pop group they Toomorrow (Toomorrow too much, get it?) to finance their musical studies. (How many English students work through college? you may ask, but never mind: read on, and bear in mind that the film’s got Transatlantic export written all over it).
The four live in Chelsea (where all penniless students tend to gravitate) and its girl member, Olivia, play house-mother to the boys, Karl, Ben and Vic.
All very comfy, but wait. Their “tonaliser” produces such groovy electronic sounds that it turns on the Alphians, a super-species from outer space who are dying because their vibrations ain’t getting through so good no more.
The Alphian ambassador to Earth (who’s been here a couple of million years and lives in a groovy house on Hampstead Heath) is ordered to kidnap the Toomorrow group and carry them back to his higher ups.
SAUCER
This he does, whisking them up a force ray to a flying saucer hovering a few thousand light years above the Heath. Poor Roy Dorrice: in his tight little monkey suit, he makes pretty heavy weather of these goings on.
Alas, the Alphians find that Toomorrow can’t groove unless their audience grooves with them. So the spacemen hatch a plan to kidnap the entire audience at a Round House popfest. Which they do, but don’t fret, it all comes out right in the end! The whole idea was so puerile that it had to be done with a splash for it come off at all.
But Toomorrow fails through some basic flaws in design. its First. the Toomorrow people, Olivia Newton John, Ben Thomas and Vic Cooper (the group was tailor made for its screen launching rather as The Monkees were invented for TV) are basically thin on character, and sound.
The idea of a pop fest grooving to Olivia’s reedy little voice and mediocre noises several years out of date that would put a Moog synthesiser to shame just isn’t on.
True, the group includes a hip little coloured lad who clicks around like a transistorised Sammy Davis Jr., and Olivia’s bubbly personality and ducky little legs stand her in good stead, but the four are too clean limbed to be true. I kept expecting them to get draft papers for Vietnam.
Again, the counterplot of a student sit-in at the College of Arts, with heavy-handed parallels with campus life, is far too American for my stomach.
HARMLESS
Still, as I say, it’s harmless and diverting stuff, and the special space effects are very well done indeed. (1 remember especially a time-shift scene in which the group goes by stages back childhood).
There’s a perfect little cameo performance, too, from Rohan McCullough as a siren from outer space.
Family entertainment all the way. But certainly nothing more.
Read more about the movie