Saturday Night (15) |Close-Up Film Review

Dir. Jason Reitman, US, 2024, 109 mins
Cast: Gabriel LaBelle, Dylan O’Brien, Matt Wood,
Review by .Carol Allen
Created by producer Ned Sherrin, That Was The Week That Was or TW3 as it became known, upset a lot of powerful people and was taken off in December 1963 as a General Election was coming up in 1964 and the powers that be feared the programme might influence the voters. It returned later that year however in a slightly different format as Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life. Between them the two programmes made stars of David Frost, Millicent Martin, Roy Kinnear, Roy Hudd, Michael Crawford and Eleanor Bron to name but a few I was part of the “backscreen” team, so too was an ambitious young researcher named Esher Rantzen. The series itself though sadly only did one season and then was gone.
Then in October 1975 something very similar happened in America with the launch of Saturday Night Live, the brainchild of a then very young producer called Lorne Michaels. That also featured largely then unknown young artists, who then became stars – a pattern the show, which is still going, has repeated over nearly half a century, going on to make stars of people like Goldie Hawn, Tina Fey, Eddie Murphy, Billy Crystal, Joan Cusack, Will Ferrell et al.
The film is director Jason L’s recreation of the chaotic 90 minutes before Saturday Night Live went to air for the first time. Not I’m told 100% accurate, in that it brings in a few characters who didn’t actually appear on SNL on the first night but took part later but the chaos we see on screen here was indeed what it was really like. The restless, ever moving camera captures the air of excitement, nervousness and uncertainty.
Rehearsing a sketch young Dan Ackroyd (Dylan O’Brien) falls foul of a door handle refusing to turn, then a lamp then falls on the set starting a small fire. John Belushi (Matt Wood) moons about like an eccentric and sulky ten year old, which is pretty much how we remember him. Meanwhile the show’s young producer Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle), who looks at times like a demented Dudley Moore, moves restlessly from studio floor to control room to dressing rooms, dealing with one crisis or drama after another, aware all the time that the doubting eye of his boss (Willem Dafoe) is on him. If this mad enterprise doesn’t work, it will be fade to black for Lorne
The film captures the look of the period in its colour and lighting, while the actors convincingly recreate those then unknown artists. Ackroyd, Belushi, Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith, who’s a bit of a Chase look alike anyway), Jim Henson (Nicholas Braun), George Carlin (Matthew Rhys) Gilda Radner (Ella Hun) and a particularly striking contribution from Lamorne Morris as Garrett Morris- no relation, who was an already well established star, so feeling somewhat out of place among all those young newbies.
The actors are all good. What we see of the sketches however isn’t that impressive by contemporary British satire standards but a sketch where a group of female construction workers submit a scantily clad Ackroyd to their unwanted attentions captures the sexism of the 70s, as does a creepy routine featuring an ageing Milton Berle (J.K. Simmons) ogling what could at the time have been described as “scantily clad lovelies”, which is a bit of a stomach turner. And young Gabriel LaBelle as Lorne holds it all together as the programme frequently threatens to fall apart before it even gets to air.
Even though I’ve never seen Saturday Night Live the show itself I found it both historically fascinating and entertaining to learn about this cultural phenomenon which launched so many talented young people, many of whom then went on to make a worldwide impact through the movies.
What we want now though is for a British company to make a film about TW3 and after. Any casting suggestions for Ned Sherrin, Millicent Martin and of course David Frost?