One More Time

Some time ago I featured swinging sixties Sammy Davis Jr/Peter Lawford comedy Salt and Pepper as a random movie trailer.  I mentioned then that, despite the film having effectively vanished, at the time of its release it had been successful enough to spawn a sequel.  Well, here's the trailer for that sequel. One More Time saw the light of day in 1970, by when the swinging sixties had played themselves out and London looked dirty and exhausted, rather than fashionable.  Which might explain the switch to a country house location from the original's Soho setting.  As this is a film I don't ever recall seeing, I can't vouch for its comedic quality.  However, it got even worse reviews than the first film.  Whilst that hadn't harmed Salt and Pepper's box office, the lack of any further instalments in their adventures would seem to indicate that One More Time didn't enjoy the same levels of popular success.

Which isn't really surprising - by 1970 this sort of star romp was falling out of fashion.  It's a curious thing that whilst decades are a purely human construct, denoted arbitrarily, they do often have their own character and the transition from one decade to the other is palpable.  This was especially the case with sixties and seventies.  The start of the new decade felt like a real jolt, as the world abruptly moved from free love and hippies to energy crises and terrorists.  In the UK the contrast was made even more stark by the change from a Labour to a Conservative government - the establishment, in the form of Ted Heath, was back with a vengeance.  Add to that the break up of The Beatles and the death of Jimi Hendrix and the feelgood sixties, with their feeling that we were all moving forward, were well and truly over.  One More Time, with its Rat Pack buddy movie high jinks, was released into the midst of all this gloom.  Even now, at this distance in time, it seems completely out of step with its era.  The trailer gives the impression that the stars had a ball making the film, which usually doesn't bode well for viewers - it often indicates a self-indulgent overblown home movie rather than a proper feature film.

One last point of interest is that the film was directed by Jerry Lewis, whose own starring vehicles I've always found unbearable.  Again, that doesn't bode well for One More Time.  Still, at least it got released, unlike Lewis' other directorial effort from this period, the spectacularly tasteless sounding The Day The Clown Cried, his infamous attempt to make a movie about a clown employed to entertain children in a Nazi concentration camp.  To this day, that one remains locked in Lewis' private vault, with orders for it to be destroyed upon his death.