The film is a vehicle for pop band the Dave Clark Five, whose popularity at the time rivalled that of the Beatles, and it is named after their hit song "Catch Us If You Can".

During the filming of a TV commercial for a "Meat for Go" campaign set in London's Smithfield Market, stuntman Steve, disillusioned by the inanity of his job, absconds in an E-type Jaguar (260 EYW, one of the props) with a young actress/model, Dinah.

On their journey, Steve and Dinah first encounter a group of beatniks squatting in MOD-owned buildings on Salisbury Plain (some of this sequence was shot in the evacuated village of Imber), and then, an eccentric, upper-class, middle-aged married couple in the opulent surroundings of the Royal Crescent in Bath, Somerset.

Clark had worked as a stuntman on several films, which appears to have provided him with a level of cinematic experience and camera sense rare for a pop artist of the time.

The film is less of a conventional pop vehicle than one dealing with the frailty of personal relationships, the flimsiness of dreams and the difficulty of maintaining spontaneity, authenticity, and integrity in a stage-managed "society of the spectacle.

"[opinion] Boorman's debut film drew favourable notices from Pauline Kael and Dilys Powell,[citation needed] as it captured much of the cultural energy of the time.

[5] According to John Boorman, the success of A Hard Day's Night enabled Cohen to sell Warner Bros a film about the Dave Clark Five before it had even been made.

[6] in April 1964 Variety listed a Dave Clark Film, then called Glad all over, with Sidney Hayers attached as director, Peter Rogers as producer and Kathy Kirby as the female lead.

He comes dressed as Harpo Marx to the Arts Ball party (until Dinah switches costumes with him to avoid being caught by the police and her bosses; this is evident not only in the film but also on the back cover of the soundtrack album).

[11] Peter Nichols wrote in his memoirs that the final script was "a pretentious odyssey about middle-aged entrepreneurs exploiting young talent, crammed with irony, philosophic overtones and three-syllable words.

"[21] The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: Two things make this an intriguingly unusual teenage musical: it is consistently worth looking at, and it finds intelligent expression for a genuinely youthful point of view.

The musical numbers (played off screen by the Dave Clark Five) are used simply as an aural background or as a starting point for a series of distinctly imaginative visual passages: fast cutting around the poster of the meat girl; long low-angled tracking shots through London; snowscapes and seascapes and Bath's Royal Crescent artistically photographed by Manny Wynn; a Felliniesque party that ends up with the leading characters, dressed as their favourite film personalities, involved in a frantic chase along the edge of a Roman bath. ...

Remarkably, in view of the fact that John Boorman, who has worked for television, is only thirty-one and is making his first film, this is a director's picture from start to finish.

[23] Writing in the Ottawa Citizen, reviewer Gordon Stoneham wrote: "Having a Wild Weekend is a rather odd vehicle to spotlight a group of teen-age idols, but, on the other hand, it shows them in a new and quite pleasant light.