Expresso Bongo (film)

Sleazy hustler Johnny Jackson is always on the lookout for fresh talent to exploit, while managing his hectic life with his stripper girlfriend, Maisie King. Maisie is looking to find a better life in singing.

Jackson discovers a teenage singer named Bert Rudge in an espresso coffee shop and sets about sending him along the rocky road to fame. He changes his name to Bongo Herbert and soon gets him a record deal and a relationship with an ageing American singing sensation Dixie Collins.

Johnny gets a meeting with Mr Mayer of Garrick Records and gets Maisie to phone him there pretending to be representative from the His Master's Voice label, this prompts Mr Mayer into giving Bongo a contract.

However, Bongo soon realises that his 50/50 contract, which he naively agreed with Johnny, is not as great as he thought it was, and breaks from Johnny's contract with help from Dixie Collins, because Bongo is still legally a minor.

• Laurence Harvey as Johnny Jackson
• Sylvia Syms as Maisie King
• Yolande Donlan as Dixie Collins
• Cliff Richard as Bert Rudge / Bongo Herbert
• Meier Tzelniker as Mayer
• Ambrosine Phillpotts as Lady Rosemary
• Eric Pohlmann as Leon (credited as Eric Pohlman)
• Gilbert Harding as Himself
• Hermione Baddeley as Penelope
• Reginald Beckwith as Reverend Tobias Craven
• The Shadows as Themselves (credited as Bongo's Backing Band)

The film was made at Shepperton Studios, near London. Some scenes were filmed on location, in London's Soho district. The University of London website for December, 2015, states that 32, Hanway Street, London, was also used for some of the film's scenes. Formerly 'Dicken's Chop House', about 1955 it had become 'The 'Chiquito Club' and espresso coffee bar. Its first proprietor, K. D. Emihea, (later imprisoned for contempt of court), held a license in 1957 for two guitar players, but not for dancing. The basement was a skiffle singing room.

Director Val Guest engaged Kenneth MacMillan to choreograph the strip-club dancers who appear in the film. Struggling to get them to dance and sing to playback at the same time, MacMillan complained, "It's the simplest routine. They may have looks, legs and tits, but they have no co-ordination."^{[citation needed]}

At first, Laurence Harvey was undecided on the kind of accent he would give his character, so Guest told him he was "part Soho, part Jewish, and part middle-class" and that it might be an idea to model him on the writer Wolf Mankowitz. Harvey arranged a couple of lunches with the unsuspecting Mankowitz to study the writer at close hand, so the character Johnny Jackson in the film sounds something like the writer of the film.^[3]

Harvey's character sports a melange of accents including his own South African. Wolf Mankowitz appears in the film's opening credit sequence, wearing a sandwich-board bearing his writer credit.

This was the second screen appearance for Cliff Richard and the Shadows in 1959, the first being Serious Charge.

The music soundtrack for the 1959 film was produced by Norrie Paramor. With the exception of one song, it was entirely different from the music that was used in the 1958 stage musical. The music and the plot were rewritten to downplay the satire and showcase Richard and his band. Only "The Shrine on the Second Floor" — a song that was intended to drive a sharpened stake into the heart of all sentimental ballads about mother – made it into the movie, but Richard sang it straight.^{[citation needed]}