The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash (1978)

          Until the 2004 premiere of Spamalot, the stage musical that he adapted from Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), this made-for-TV mockumentary was Eric Idle’s most noteworthy accomplishment outside of the work that he did as a member of the Monty Python comedy troupe. An elaborate spoof of the Beatles told in the form of a TV retrospective about a fictional band, The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash was written by Idle, who also co-directed the piece with Gary Weis, and he plays several roles. A couple of Idle’s fellow Pythons appear, as do several rock-music luminaries—including, wink-wink, one of the real Fab Four, George Harrison. Plus, since Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels produced the project, a number of Not Ready for Prime Time Players show up: Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Bill Murray, Gilda Radner.

          It would be exaggerating to say that the star wattage completely outshines the material, but that’s close to the truth—some scenes in The Rutles merely re-create famous Beatles moments and/or songs with only the slightest of comedic tweaks. Flip side, the best segments of The Rutles are enjoyably droll. Furthermore, the sheer verisimilitude of the piece, replicating everything from camera angles to costumes to songs, puts The Rutles nearly on par with Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982) and Zelig (1983) in terms of impressive mimicry.

          The “story” of The Rutles will seem awfully familiar. A group of kids form a scrappy band, become popular with female fans, cohere into a sophisticated musical unit, experiment with drugs and sociopolitical messages, and finally drift apart. (In sum, “a musical legend that will last a lunchtime.”) Although many famous songs are parodied (“Help!” is lampooned by “Ouch!”), many of the tunes are patchworks of Beatles-esque melodies and lyrics. Occasionally, the gags have satirical edge, as when the Beatles’ “Let It Be” is referenced by the Rutles’ “Let It Rot”; considering Paul McCartney’s misgivings about the Let It Be album and the link that project has to the Beatles’ final days, the “Let It Rot” gag has teeth. An even meaner joke of the same stripe is the runner about the Rutles’ manager being preoccupied with his clients’ tight trousers. Presumably Idle meant no disrespect to Beatles manager Brian Epstein, who was gay, but still—a bit nasty, that one. Conversely, Idle occasionally replaces historical figures with totally dissimilar characters, for instance featuring a distaff artist in Nazi regalia where one would expect to find an analogue for Yoko Ono.

          For all the care the filmmakers took in re-creating things, some of the best jokes are unrelated to the Beatles—one recurring bit involves Idle playing a TV host who endures an antagonistic relationship with his cameraman. Ultimately, The Rutles does little to tarnish the Beatles’ reputation, but the derivative nature of the piece, as well as the hit-0r-miss quality of the humor, defines The Rutles as a minor effort. Nonetheless, the Rutles concept has endured. Originally introduced during a sketch on a 1970s BBC show that Idle created, the Rutles regrouped in the late ’90s, starred in The Rutles 2: Can’t Buy Me Lunch (2002), and even became a touring band, usually with Idle’s musical partner and the cocreator of the Rutles concept, Neil Innes, occupying center stage. 

The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash: FUNKY

Birth of the Beatles (1979)

          The history of the Fab Four has been discussed and dissected and disseminated so many times that it’s become something of a campfire tale. John Lennon partisans have one version, Paul McCartney fans offer a different take, and so on. Birth of the Beatles offers yet another perspective—that of Pete Best, who was the Beatles’ drummer during the early years of 1960 to 1962, and was fired just months before the release of the band’s first hit single, “Love Me Do.” In this telling, Best was canned because he was more popular with female fans than Lennon or McCartney, although the historical consensus is that record-label execs felt the Beatles needed a stronger player, hence the hiring of Ringo Starr. Best served as a consultant for Birth of the Beatles, one of many reasons why every assertion the movie makes should be regarded with skepticism.

          Adherence to facts notwithstanding, Birth of the Beatles is a moderately entertaining musical biopic that gains strength as it trudges along. Early sequences, depicting the group’s formation in Liverpool, feel lively but anonymous, with lookalike actors simulating the mischievous behavior of five lads with greasy hair and leather jackets. The fifth, of course, is the other early Beatle, doomed bassist Stuart Sutcliffe. Once Birth of the Beatles decamps to Germany, where the Beatles earned their performance chops in nightclubs, the storytelling gains potency. Items including the band’s friendship with German photographer Astrid Kircherr and Sutcliffe’s sudden death from a brain aneurysm are handled fairly well. More importantly, it’s during this passage that actor Stephen MacKenna, as Lennon, finds his groove in what amounts to the film’s leading role. Beyond simulating Lennon’s alternately fiery and playful stage persona, MacKenna captures textures ranging from belligerence to determination to self-pity to toughness. Furthermore, the rougher things get for the Beatles—disappointments, friction, the tantalizing promise of success—the more the intensity of the film grows.

         Produced by Dick Clark, the picture takes a sensible approach to re-creating the Beatles’ music, with the tribute band Rain performing on the soundtrack while the actors lip-sync onscreen. Yet Birth of the Beatles communicates very little that’s new to serious fans, while casual fans may find it disappointing that the movie ends with the Beatles’ Ed Sullivan performance, the group’s American breakthrough. (Years later, the period dramatized in Birth of the Beatles was revisited in the 1994 European film Backbeat.) Incidentally, Birth of the Beatles was released in scattershot fashion, hitting theaters in Europe and some American markets before airing on U.S. television.

Birth of the Beatles: FUNKY

All This and World War II (1975)

          This one needs a disclaimer. While the film All This and World War II is quite awful, taking a wrongheaded idea far into the realm of bad taste, the movie features a nifty soundtrack comprising covers of Beatles songs by noteworthy musicians. Therefore, it’s possible to watch the flick as a sampler platter for the songs, some of which appear via snippets and some of which are played in their entirety. The basic premise of All This and World War II is as simple as it is stupefying—using the Beatles’ songbook as the score for a greatest-hits survey of how key events during World War II affected Great Britain. The resulting juxtapositions of songs and imagery (newsreels, stock footage, and clips from fictional films released by 20th Century-Fox, the distributor of All This and World War II) are maddeningly literal. Helen Reddy sings “Fool on the Hill” over shots of Hitler during prewar days. Henry Gross performs “Help!” over scenes of Nazi tank commander Erwin Rommel pummeling UK forces in North Africa, as well as scenes of American President Franklin Roosevelt battling resistance from isolationists in order to help—get it?—the British. Sometimes, director Susan Winslow struggles so hard to match footage with tunes that madness ensues: Why the hell does Leo Sayer howl “I Am the Walrus” during combat scenes? And what’s the deal with Frankie Laine crooning “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” during a sequence celebrating American volunteerism?

          Yet the truly cringe-inducing bits involve generalizations about race and culture, such as matching the Bee Gees’ version of “Sun King” with Pearl Harbor and pairing Richard Cocciante’s weirdly overwrought take on “Michelle” with the liberation of France. To Winslow’s credit, every so often something works. Sayer’s plaintive reading of “The Long and Winding Road” works as accompaniment for harrowing images of London during the blitz, and Jeff Lynne’s faithful remake of “Nowhere Man” is a droll companion for shots of ousted Italian strongman Benito Mussolini in exile. Still, the basic flaw of this project—matching the Beatles’ peace-and-love tunes with war imagery—becomes painfully clear in the end, which is to say marrying the London Symphony Orchestra’s performance of “The End” with a shot of an A-bomb test meant to represent America’s nuclear attack on Japan. Just wrong. As for the handful of cover versions that add luster to the enterprise, including Elton John’s hit version of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” (listen for John Lennon himself singing the chorus), they are better appreciated outside the context of this misguided movie.

All This and World War II: LAME

I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978)

          Robert Zemeckis’ directorial debut is hard to dislike—every iota of the film’s energy is devoted to stimulating audience engagement—but at the same time it’s unlikely to generate much in the way of passionate adoration. Slight in the extreme, the picture spins a fictional ensemble yarn around the Beatles’ first Ed Sullivan Show appearance in 1964, thus presenting in microcosm the whole scope of the “Beatlemania” phenomenon. First among the problems with this approach is the way the movie dances around the onscreen absence of the real Beatles. The Fab Four licensed more than a dozen of their early songs, so the soundtrack explodes with the joy of “I Saw Her Standing There,” “Please Please Me,” “She Loves You,” and the title song, among others. Yet whenever the Beatles are involved in a scene, Zemeckis uses stand-ins, vocal imitators, and cheat angles that show only backs or legs or such. (Admittedly, his staging of the band’s actual Ed Sullivan performance, footage of which is shown on the monitors of cameras during taping, is highly resourceful.)

          On a deeper level, I Wanna Hold Your Hand suffers from the use of stereotypical characterizations. None of the fictional people in the movie are offensive, per se, but they range from drab to obnoxious, so it’s hard to care what happens to any of them. The main characters are four young women from Jersey. Grace (Theresa Saldana) wants to shoot exclusive photos of the Beatles so she can start a career as a photojournalist; Janis (Susan Kendall Newman) hates the Beatles and plans to picket their appearance; Pam (Nancy Allen) is a nice girl who claims she’s above Beatlemania but, of course, ends up taking crazy risks to get near the lads from Liverpool; and Rosie (Wendie Jo Sperber) is a screaming superfan who’ll do anything to meet Paul McCartney. The guys who take part in the distaff quartet’s adventure are even less dimensional than the ladies. Larry (Marc McClure) is a nebbish who tags along because he’s hot for Grace; Tony (Bobby De Cicco) is an insufferable bad boy who hates the Beatles and therefore serves as a mild sort of antagonist; and Richard (Eddie Deezen) is a borderline-psycho nerd who matches Rosie’s fanaticism.

          As was the case with so many early Zemeckis projects, the story unfolds in a screwball-comedy style, with accidents and coincidences and misunderstandings colliding against each other to create chaos. There’s no question that co-writers Zemeckis and Bob Gale evince tremendous imagination throughout I Wanna Hold Your Hand, and the scribes treat their characters with obvious affection. But, man, after a while, the car chases and pratfalls and shouting matches get awfully loud and repetitive. That said, I Wanna Hold Your Hand marked the arrival of a naturally gifted filmmaker, and it’s impressive how well many scenes work given that the overall movie is so lightweight. Plus, of course, the excitement of the film’s soundtrack is impossible to deny.

I Wanna Hold Your Hand: FUNKY

Let It Be (1970)

          A fascinating rock doc whose interest stems more from historical significance than cinematic merit, Let It Be came closer than any other artifact to capturing the breakup of the Beatles while it was happening. The film’s history is complex. After completing The White Album, a stressed-out Fab Four followed band member Paul McCartney’s suggestion to make a stripped-down LP featuring live-in-studio jams rather than another record filled with elaborate overdubbing. The concept eventually grew to include a visual component, with British filmmaker Michael Lindsay-Hogg recruited to shoot the recording sessions for a proposed TV special. At the time, circa early 1969, the project was titled Get Back after one of the songs slated for inclusion.

          However, the tensions that eventually broke up the band, exacerbated by the intrusion of film cameras, threw the recording sessions into disarray. Although a dramatic finale was shot, featuring a legendary rooftop performance in London that became the band’s final concert, the movie (and the album) went on the shelf while the Beatles recorded their last album, Abbey Road, and then disbanded. Thus, by the time the Get Back project was resuscitated for audio release (with superstar American producer Phil Spector hired to sweeten the raw tracks, defeating the project’s original purpose), the Beatles were effectively a memory, at least as a performing/recording entity.

          Linsday-Hogg’s footage, trimmed down to an unvarnished 81-minute snapshot for theatrical exhibition, became the antithesis of the loose celebration McCartney originally envisioned. Instead, the movie is dreary and slow, despite the inclusion of many wonderfully energetic songs, so watching the picture is like eavesdropping on the tension preceding a divorce.

          McCartney and his longtime songwriting partner, John Lennon, look as if they can’t stand each other, and they’re clearly operating on different frequencies. McCartney is a hard-driving populist eager to give the people what they want, whereas Lennon (with Yoko Oko at his side) has already transitioned into a more experimental phase in his creative life. Guitarist George Harrison actually gets in a few snippy comments against McCartney—although the ugly moment when he temporarily quit the band was left on the cutting-room floor—and easygoing drummer Ringo Starr simply looks uncomfortable.

          Still, despite the sometimes-painful studio footage, Let It Be ends on a triumphant note with the arrival of irrepressible keyboardist Billy Preston. His optimism and spirited playing seem to reset the Beatles’ brains so that, for those few glorious moments atop the Apple Records building, they actually seem to enjoy performing with each other. Good luck finding a copy of Let It Be these days, however; after a brief VHS release in the ’80s, the movie went out of print and is now mostly available via bootleg DVDs.

Let It Be: GROOVY

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978)

          One of the Bee Gees’ catchy disco ballads, released a year before they conquered the world’s dancefloors with the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, was titled “Love So Right.” The song’s anguished chorus laments, “Maybe you can tell me how a love so right can turn out to be so wrong.” It seems apropos to paraphrase the sentiment when considering Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which costars the Bee Gees and ’70s rock god Peter Frampton: Can anyone tell why an idea so right turned into a movie so very, very wrong? It’s not as if there wasn’t ample precedent for translating the music of the Beatles into amiable motion pictures.

          During their ’60s heyday, the Fab Four appeared in several lively flicks powered by tunes from the Lennon-McCartney songbook. And if the Beatles were no longer a band by the time this project took shape, who’s to say a fresh batch of mop-topped kids couldn’t have carried the cinematic torch? Unfortunately, producer Robert Stigwood transformed the Beatles’ LP Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band into one of the most deranged flops in cinema history: Every frame of Sgt. Pepper’s is so mind-bogglingly inappropriate that the film is mesmerizing for the wrong reasons.

          Here’s the backstory. In 1974, Stigwood produced a London stage show called Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on the Road, which combined the Beatles’ music with a loose narrative. Three years later, Stigwood produced the movie and soundtrack of Saturday Night Fever, which made the Bee Gees into superstars. Combining two of his assets, Stigwood hired the Bee Gees to act in a film adapted from the stage show. He also recruited white-hot English guitarist/singer Frampton to round out the principal cast. (The fact that none of the leads had significant acting experience apparently didn’t matter.) Pressing forward, Stigwood hired first-time screenwriter Henry Edwards to pen the screenplay, then enlisted Michael Schultz, best known for helming a series of African-American-themed comedies, to direct. (Again, the fact that neither Edwards nor Schultz had demonstrated affinity for musical storytelling was disregarded.)

          Stigwood’s hubris was compounded by the choice to make Sgt. Pepper’s on a grand scale, employing gaudy special effects, opulent production design, and random guest appearances. A mishmash of clichés culled from the worlds of fantasy fiction and showbiz melodrama, Sgt. Pepper’s plays out like a fever-dream fusion of A Star Is Born and The Wizard of Oz. From the very first scene, the bad-movie die is cast. A title card announces that we’re in “August 1918, the tiny village of Fleu de Coup.” Against a World War I backdrop, we meet the original Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, an American marching band so likeable they convince soldiers to stop fighting. Returning to their U.S. hometown, Heartland, the band continues entertaining people through to the World War II era, and the citizens of Heartland decide to erect a golden weathervane in Sgt. Pepper’s honor.

          The now-aged musician strikes up the band for one final performance at the weathervane unveiling, then drops dead after a few notes. A generation later, circa the ’70s, four new musicians take up the Sgt. Pepper mantle: Billy Shears (Frampton) and the Henderson brothers (the Bee Gees). Barely 10 minutes into the movie, Sgt. Pepper’s is already buried in convoluted hogwash. Yet somehow, it gets worse.

          While an evil record executive (Donald Pleasence) seduces the young musicians with drugs, money, and women, the bizarre villain Mean Mr. Mustard (Frankie Howard) conspires to steal the original Sgt. Pepper instruments from a Heartland museum. Later, the musicians encounter a madman (Alice Cooper) who brainwashes America’s youth, and a plastic surgeon (Steve Martin) who gives rich old people new bodies. There’s also a love story between Billy and his hometown sweetheart, Strawberry Fields (Sandy Farina), and battle between the heroes and a villainous rock group (portrayed by Aerosmith).

          The whole thing climaxes with the weathervane coming to life as a super-powered messiah (played by real-life Beatles sideman Billy Preston) in a bizarre scene that completely reverses every significant dramatic event that happened previously. In a word, Sgt. Pepper’s is insane. Consider the dream sequence in which costar George Burns, then 80-ish, straps on an electric guitar to croak “Fixing a Hole.” And we haven’t even discussed the dancing robots. The Bee Gees and Frampton feel like guest stars in their own movie, since none of the quartet delivers a single line of dialogue, and even their musical performances are wildly erratic (although Frampton sings “Golden Slumbers” nicely). Therefore, the only people who don’t completely embarrass themselves are Martin, who gets to be funny on purpose, and Preston, whose natural funk somehow elevates him above the ludicrous surroundings.

Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band: FREAKY