Seaside Swingers (aka Every Day's A Holiday)
A group of high-spirited youngsters finds friendship, love, and music together while working summer jobs at a holiday camp in this Merseybeat musical. Gerry (John Leyton) is a bartender who fantasizes about being a famous pop star. Christina (Grazina Frame) is an upper-class bird who sneaks off to be a waitress against the wishes of her Aunt Winifred (Hazel Hughes), who would rather she keep up her operatic voice lessons with the great Italian maestro Professor Bastinado (Ron Moody). Susan and Jennifer (Susan and Jennifer Baker) are boy-crazy twins who work in the nursery, and Timothy Gilben (Mike Sarne) is the arrogant nightclub singer who signs on as the camp's entertainer before realizing his audience will be a gaggle of preschoolers. The camp's annual talent show is to be televised live this season, so the gang sets aside their jockeying for each other's affections long enough to form a musical group. They need to practice in secret to keep Christina away from her meddling Aunt Winifred, but Gerry's father (Michael Ripper) recognizes the Professor as a Cockney comic from the old music hall days, and the outed Bastinado is forced to help the kids if he wants to keep his secret. British Invasion pop stars Freddie and the Dreamers appear as five musical, madcap chefs and sing two numbers, while Liverpool beat group the Mojos supply some hard teenage blues during a swinging dance club scene.

Every Day's a Holiday (known to American audiences as Seaside Swingers) is an insufferably sunny, corny romp that will put guilty smiles on the faces of anyone who loves the Merseybeat sound. While the bulk of the music is vocal and interweaved with the plot, a number of full-band performances from the Mojos and Freddie and the Dreamers (doing "The Freddie," no less) offers the rare chance to watch some nearly forgotten British Invasion groups at the peak of their brief popularity. But there's far more pop than rock on display, as the teenage leads sing sticky ballads and smarmy show tunes, stumbling through outlandish choreography with various levels of proficiency. Every Day's a Holiday is breezy, goofy fun without a brain in its head, and should inspire a nostalgic mood in any viewer who can overlook some very dated prejudices; there is a brief blackface routine within the first five minutes, and, in two separate songs, Christina is said to be "not too smart" (or at least, "not as smart as men"). Still, much of the comedy is sharp and the entire exercise is energetic and quintessential British, with Cockney slang abounding and what appears to be vintage footage of an actual holiday camp in 1965. Michael Ripper -- who plays Gerry's father as a faded music hall star with a few more soft-shoes left in him -- was best known for his work in Hammer studios horror pictures (he appeared in The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb the same year). John Leyton had some British pop chart success in the early '60s working with legendary superproducer Joe Meek, and Mike Sarne went on to direct the bizarre big-budget gender-bender Myra Breckenridge. Director James H. Hill returned the following year with the deathless family classic Born Free. FRED BELDIN