Although I have already written about Help! on a previous post, I don’t think I ever made due reference on how interesting a full analysis on The Beatles’ movies can become.
It would take an awful lot of time to fully cover every aspect of their film work – maybe one day someone will study it in a PhD thesis or so -, but it’s always nice to have a closer glimpse to their path through the big screen, remembering how innovative they were – in some ways – when it comes to rock bands/stars making movies; we neither have Elvis-like material nor Pink Floyd’s The Wall-style: what we do have are five different movies with excellent soundtracks and in fields that go from animation to documentary. And just as it happens with the Beatles’ albuns, everybody has their favourite.
The big adventure began with Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night back in 1964, whose wonderful black&white cinematography illustrated a light, unpretencious comedy that had its plot based on Paul’s uncle – played by Wilfrid Brambell – giving Ringo second thoughts about his role in the band. Ringo Starr’s talent as an actor would grant him central roles in the following films (he holds the sacrificial ring in Help!, for example) and Lennon’s sarcastic humour – that can easily be observed in his two books, In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works - made Lester offer him a part in the anti-war black comedy How I Won the War (1967).
Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night trailer (1964)
Help! (1965) was hardly more than a caprice from the studio and The Beatles themselves. Playing with their own lifestyle in Technicolor for the first time, the plot was arranged so they could go wherever they wanted to: ‘Let’s film in the Bahamas, I’ve heard the weather’s great there’ or ‘Let’s try skiing in Switzerland’ were some of their own “ideas” for another Richard Lester’s film direction. Once again there was comedy, great songs and girls screming inside the theaters whenever the Fab Four appeared on the screen.
Richard Lester’s Help! trailer (1965)
But after a series of events – Epstein’s death, LSD craze, end of stage shows -, it finally appears the experimental TV-film Magical Mystery Tour. It first aired in black&white on BBC1 during Boxing Day. And it was hated. Almost scriptless, it showed the four guys fragmented in their own little worlds – we mustn’t forget the tent’s scene in which we find a born-again Harrison contributing with Blue Jay Way, while McCartney jumped alone like the fool on the hill and Lennon claimed being the walrus. Dream-inspired sequences seem to follow without anything to connect them but the Beatles themselves, and the cult around Magical Mystery Tour would take years to be properly built.
Bernard Knowles and The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour trailer (1967)
Fortunately, The Beatles redeemed themselves with one of the greatest masterpieces in animation of all time. Yellow Submarine was released in 1968, directed by George Dunning and only featuring The Beatles in the final scene (their characters were voiced-off by other actors). Produced in the middle of the Psychedelic daze, its innovative shape amongst cartoon-like movies made it become a hit that remains a case-study to this day for film and animation students.
George Dunning’s Yellow Submarine trailer (1968)
And finally we have Let it Be, exactly four decades ago today. Initially conceived to portrait the making-of of a rock album, the film gained a life of itself by being the main testemonial of the band’s breakup; mean, unappropriate remarks are made between the four members and illustrate how people grow apart personal, professional, and artistically. And the roof-top concert in the end of the film has some hidden aura of a ‘goodbye friend’ hommage, like a funeral of The Beatles-personas mixed with an awkward sense of relief. Although the film and the album were recorded before Abbey Road was, they were both released afterwords (1970), working as self-explanatory for people that still wondered why they had broken up (even if many of them preferred the Yoko Ono’s syndrome theory).
Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s Let it Be trailer (1970)
40 years have gone by since then, and The Beatles remain as one of the few bands that tried to experiment and innovate in almost every level; their movies act almost as a metaphor not only of the sixties themselves but also of the innocence gradually given birth to fearless artistic assureness as one realizes that there’s always a price to pay for coming of age.
