"The film for all its lighthearted cheerfulness, does not amount to much, but it's a good cut above the beach party capers that American-International used to make for the young audience. Don't be too surprised if some of our American young people, after they have seen it, decide to finish their educations in merry young England. Aside from the moral issues, which I'm totally unqualified to untangle, I found the film preferable by far to some heavy-handed exercises that have just emerged from Hollywood."
- Hollis Alpert, Saturday Review

"A lighthearted look at teen-agers with engaging performances from a largely unknown lineup of youngsters, this picture should click by touching the mood of the times...Clive Donner's production has a nimble alertness to juvenile characteristics and a nice flair for comedy...it's pleasantly salted with lines about young sexual ambitions and their difficult achievement...Barry Evans wins both sympathy and laughs as the boy...A further asset of the picture is the music soundtrack, with a hit theme from The Traffic and other apt sounds from Spencer Davis."
- Variety

"Of all the "with-it" youth films of the 1960s, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush is the one that broke the most ground. Its take on teenage sex was relatively honest, and it didn't pander. In some respects, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush seems like a British analog to The Graduate [1967]."
- Bruce Eder, Hollywood Rock: A Guide to Rock'n'Roll in the Movies

"If sound in movies does not matter to you - or if only Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush were a silent film - it might be a good movie to see....It has the worst script, bar none, I have ever heard. One wisecrack relentlessly follows another - neither funny nor true to the unfunny wisecracks people make in real life. There are countless strongly off-color remarks - all of them embarrassingly not quite humor, the way the off-color jokes of children are...it is impossible to convey this sort of thing accurately; its awfulness is cumulative - and if you also don't mind voices pitched to a shrill unpleasantness, there is still the plot. It is a kind of cross between Billy Liar [1963] and Closely Watched Trains [1966]....some of the scenes are dull while others have some of the tasteless excesses of What's New, Pussycat? [1965] but from a pictorial point of view - of what a new fantasy of mod love and courtship might look like."
- Renata Adler, The New York Times

"....Mr. Donner's revelation - via a 24-year-old actor who passes for thirty on screen while attempting to portray seventeen - is that boys of seventeen, on the brink of college, have nothing but SEX on the mind and spend an entire summer discovering that some girls do and some girls don't and maybe there's more to human emotions than just the doing....But what's the point? What's new? Why impose on our time and interest? Are we really at the point where pretty pictures, preferably of the female form, are all we demand? Are moviegoers to become nothing more than voyeurs?"
- Judith Crist, New York

"...Donner's eagerness to pour 'swinging style' and pop songs over everything makes nonsense of the socially critical attitudes that filter weakly through from the script (by Hunter Davies himself). So charmless as to be almost unwatchable."
- Tom Milne, TimeOut Film Guide

"Clive Donner's Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush makes it abundantly clear that the mad, stylish, with-it new British comedies are the true heirs of the beach-party boom. Do not ask what became of Frankie Avalon; look around ye...Mulberry Bush has all the scenes you expect. There is the opening shot in which the hero dashes through a crowd of amazed middle-class folks while reciting thoughts about love and lust. There is the dance scene where swinging chicks twist while psychedelic lights play upon the crowd. How often have we been forced to sit through this dance?...There is also the obligatory night scene during which the hero, intoxicated by love runs through empty streets, his heels clicking on the cobblestones. I guess people in love do this all the time...He [Evans] looks like a younger Albert Finney, but even in his most daring pursuits Evans lacks Finney's dogged amorous dedication (which so enlivened Tom Jones [1963]). I don't really object to escapism of this sort; let us gather our rosebuds while we may. But have we forgotten what escapism really is?"
- Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times

"Repetitive comedy which certainly opened avenues in British humour and seemed pretty permissive at the time (pre-Graduate). In itself, however, more modish than sympathetic."
- Halliwell's Film & Video Guide

"The only incongruity is that it should have been made by adults, so completely does it enter into the teenager's view of himself."
- MFB

"Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush was lively, but somehow desperate that it could be no more."
- David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film

"Amiable British trifle about a frustrated teenage virgin (Evans) who fumbles numerous opportunities to "prove his manhood."
- Rock on Film

"So fashionably up to date - for 1967 - that it almost hurts, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush was considered pretty racy stuff in its day, mainly due to its sex obsessed protagonist and the plot which essentially focused on his exploits in attaining his heart's desire, which was, well, intercourse....if the film is too contrived in its efforts to depict its of the moment world, there's still charm here, mainly thanks to Evans as the actresses don't get much of a chance to provide deep characterisation. Funnily enough, this has a studied immediacy that might just sum up its era for a lot of people."
-- Graeme Clark, The Spinning Image (www.thespinningimage.co.uk/)

Compiled by Jeff Stafford