British Films 2: Three Hats For Lisa

To watch Three Hats For Lisa (1963) is not to discover some hidden masterpiece that somehow passed the critics by. In fact, it’s a true oddball of a film – a British musical in London during the swinging sixties which practically no one (other than those who saw it on Channel 4 in 1998) remembers. An Italian movie star (Sophie Hardy) comes to the city on a publicity tour for her latest film. She meets three young people, an infatuated dock worker (Joe Brown), his would be girl friend (Una Stubbs) and his best friend (Dave Nelson), as well as a crotchety taxi driver (the one and only Sid James) when she arrives at City airport. After escaping from her entourage, she runs away with them for the day. To give her the best possible experience of London, they agree to help her steal three hats for her collection.

Really, off the wall doesn’t begin to describe it. Aside from the insanity of the plot, the acting and songs are fairly average while the choreography is second rate West Side Story. So how do I explain the hold of the film, its sense of play and sheer joyfulness? Perhaps it starts with the films opening titles as the camera swoops above the Thames and the lyrics of the opening number (‘There’s something in the air, I feel it everywhere, the sort of magic that seems to say, that this is no ordinary day’). It’s the idea, already that this is fairy story, not quite real, that there might be a bit of magic in it all, and there is the feel throughout of being told a rather charming and harmless fable.

More than that though, I think, is the irrepressible optimism. Like many of the ‘youth’ films of the period, it has no ‘side’ to it, no cynical edge. It’s worth noting the similarities of say, the scene where Sid drives them around the tourist spots and Joe Brown sings about ‘London Town’ with something like The Young Ones (1961) with Cliff Richard. In both the music is jaunty; the colour is, if not quite Technicolor, then at least bright and cheerful. These are films obsessed with the new look London; the new glass and concrete buildings, which still have that just painted feel about them (although as we now know it wouldn’t take long for that to disappear - Norman Cohen’s wonderful documentary The London Nobody Knows (1967) has a very different take).

To say that Three Hats For Lisa has dated is obvious; it must have looked strange within a couple of years of being made. Obviously it has no critical credibility at all. And yet it is the kind of discovery that makes the act of watching films continually fascinating.