The Ghost Goes Gear

Year releasted: 1966

by Nathan Rabin
May 10th, 2000

Among the least noteworthy progeny of A Hard Day's Night is 1966's puzzlingly titled The Ghost Goes Gear, a slapdash attempt to harness the minor charm of the then-popular Spencer Davis Group for the big screen. The very definition of a quickie cash-in, The Ghost Goes Gear opens with the band (which included a young Steve Winwood) cheerfully lip-synching one of its songs, setting the stage for a movie in which an indifferently lip-synched musical performance is never more than a moment away. The film's slender plot has something to do with the group members traveling to their manager's ancestral home, where they encounter a lip-synch-happy ghost and decide to save the family manor by putting on a big show that takes up a good third of The Ghost Goes Gear's 79-minute running time. Apparently realizing that The Spencer Davis Group lacked the primal charisma of, say, Herman's Hermits, director Hugh Gladwish and company cunningly surround the group with a cast of seasoned English hams, allowing their British Comedy Overacting All Stars to handle the bulk of the "acting." All of which leaves plenty of time for awkwardly integrated musical performances in which the various members of The Spencer Davis Group indifferently strum away on their unplugged guitars while the pubescent Winwood emotes his way through any number of blue-eyed soul songs. During The Ghost Goes Gear's final third, the filmmakers give up any pretense of caring about plot or character and hand the movie over to their starring band and a series of random pop and jazz performers, all of whom lip-synch a song or two, sometimes while inexplicably nestled in a tree. Alas, The Ghost Goes Gear is too self-conscious and modest to be a Cool As Ice-level camp classic, but the film, while never remotely good, is an amusing relic of a time when bands didn't have to be world-conquering Goliaths to get their own lazily incompetent starring vehicles.