The Long and Winding Road:
Towards a Beatles Film History

An Introduction

The popular version of the Beatles' history has been recycled so often by the British media that it has become part of our national folklore. It has become a well-loved fairytale, an ultimate ‘rags to riches’ morality story in which four working-class boys overcome poverty, personal tragedy, and indifference to become the world’s most important and well loved pop group. Into the bargain, they give the Yanks a good hiding and prove beyond all reasonable doubt that Britain is culturally superior in the world of popular music.

There are of course other, more searching and critical histories of the group and their artistic output, but more often than not the development of their career is reduced to a series of events, charted (rather than assessed) as a highly selective sequence of hiatuses and watersheds, documented as if somehow divorced from their original social, political and artistic contexts. The Beatles appear on The Ed Sullivan Show, the Beatles play Shea Stadium, the Beatles get the MBE, the Beatles go to India to meditate, and so forth. Serious studies have been almost exclusively concerned with the Beatles' songwriting and recording career. While this is understandable (the Beatles were obviously, primarily a groundbreaking songwriting and recording unit), there are facets of the group’s career which have been overlooked for too long.

This book hopes to go some way towards redressing the balance by historically and critically reassessing what must surely be the most neglected aspect of the Beatles' output, the group's films. There have been one or two ‘coffee table’ books which place great emphasis on pictorial content, but few have dealt seriously with their films, which have largely been treated as little more than a historical footnote by writers, critics and film historians alike. Yet throughout the sixties, film was central to the Beatles’ career and, although that career was relatively short lived (their main body of recorded work spanned a mere eight years), no less than five of their major record releases were augmented by films: A Hard Day’s Night (1964), Help! (1965), Magical Mystery Tour (TVM, 1967), Yellow Submarine (1968) and Let It Be (1970).

That the films should, with a few notable exceptions, have been so neglected within film history is possibly the result of a number of critical biases prevalent within much of the discipline's methodological schemata. In particular, the generic status of the pop musical, to which the films for the most part belong, has, for reasons largely unknown to me, never garnered much interest within British film history. In addition, much film history still favours an exclusively auteurist approach, and, since the five Beatles movies were made by four different directors (or sets of directors), they do not form part of an auteurist canon. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that Dick Lester's films, A Hard Day's Night (1964) and Help! (1965), have received more critical attention than the other three movies and, while this is not to denigrate the importance of these works, the bias of approach inherent in much film history has, I am certain, been at least partly instrumental in their critical and historical prioritization. Indeed, it is interesting to speculate upon the current critical position of the films had they all been directed by a single ‘Auteur’ They may not have become the most talked about films of their period, but I suspect that they would have received much more attention than they have done.

These problems of theoretical discipline have been compounded by practical external factors concerning the availability and dissemination of the films, and despite the ongoing currency of the group's popularity, the movies have not been served well by official releases. While Yellow Submarine, A Hard Day's Night and Help! received theatrical and/or DVD re-releases since the first edition of this book, it seems astonishing that the other two films have yet to receive official British and US re-releases, given the commercial success of the other two films and their obvious marketability.

Moreover, it must be said that the position of the Beatles' movies in film history has not been aided by the poor commercial and critical reception of the group's subsequent ‘solo’ forays into film acting, production and direction. Although in the early eighties George Harrison’s Handmade production outfit was regarded as a potential saviour of the British film industry, his interests in the company have since been terminated in an explosion of legal battles. McCartney's solo attempt to script and star in a feature film, Give My Regards to Broad Street (1984), was also a resounding commercial and critical flop. Moreover, Starr's attempts to involve himself in film-making have brought little acclaim, and despite a crowning performance in That'll Be the Day (1973) his forays into film acting have rarely matched his indisputable potential, and his singular attempt at direction, Born to Boogie (1972, re-released on DVD in 2005), has gone largely unnoticed, the bulk of the attention naturally being drawn by the film's main star, Marc Bolan. His venture into film production, Son of Dracula (1972), fared little better. Add to these factors the Beatles' own seeming lack of interest in discussing the movies in any great depth and/or their out-of-hand dismissal of them (particularly by the ever acerbic Lennon), and the recipe for their relative obscurity in film history is complete.

Although the group had varying levels of financial and creative involvement in the making of their films (their input ranging from detached indifference to total immersion), the Beatles movies occupy an important position, not only within the context of their own artistic and financial development, but, from a broader perspective, within the development of British and American film and television culture as a whole.

For example, the Beatles' films were (along with their recordings and live appearances) central to the creation and maintenance of the social phenomenon of ‘Beatlemania’. After all, cinema was the only medium through which the group's ever-changing music and meticulously crafted array of ‘images’ could be fully articulated on a global scale. Without film, the Beatles' global popularity would not and could not have existed to anything like the same degree.

Also, in economic terms, the movies were influential in the development of cinema's multimedia marketing campaigns. Although primitive by today's standards, the Beatles pop musicals, along with the James Bond cycle, were amongst the most successful series of pre-seventies films to act as large-scale advertisements for ‘tie-in’ products external to the film-going experience.

Finally, from stylistic and ideological perspectives, the movies are of considerable film historical significance. Dick Lester's A Hard Day's Night was one of the first pop musicals to represent pop stars in anything other than a clean-cut, conformist, one-dimensional manner. On a purely stylistic level, it was the first film of its kind to fully realize and systematically deploy the illustrative potential of pop music, frequently rejecting the established precedent of performance-based musical sequences in favour of those which married entire songs with non-performance-based conceptual action. This radical break with previous generic conventions formed an aesthetic precedent which encompassed both the group's subsequent films (Help!, Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow Submarine) and promos (such as Strawberry Fields Forever), non-Beatles-related pop films and, perhaps most profoundly, the medium of contemporary pop video. Moreover, the Beatles were also the first pop group to become personally involved In the mechanical process of film-making and, despite its huge critical failure, Magical Mystery Tour remains the only film to have been written, financed, produced and directed by a pop group. More importantly, it was the first pop musical to break so wholeheartedly with the constraints of narrative logic, again setting an important precedent for a number of subsequent pop movies.

The intentions of this book are essentially twofold. It will provide the reader with a historical insight into the production, marketing and reception of the Beatles films, whilst also facilitating a critical evaluation of the texts themselves. In so doing, I want to evaluate and reinstate the films' significance, both within the group's own career/canon and within film history generally. My approach, which is largely chronological, is to assess the movies from a number of different: perspectives, considering their formal and ideological properties, marketing and reception within the context of sixties pop musicals., non-pop-oriented films, and British television. I will examine the social, artistic and ideological influences of the films and, in the final chapter, the influence of the Beatles movies on subsequent productions.

However, before we survey the films, an important question must first be considered. Why did the Beatles make films and what was the underlying economic rationale behind them?

I believe the answer to be twofold. First, and most obviously, making films for international distribution was the easiest and most practical way to ensure consistent global exposure, and thus to generate maximum box-office and/or television exhibition revenue. Film production provided a more efficient means of public exposure than touring or making exclusive television appearances throughout the world, and was ultimately less time-consuming for a group of international stature. Moreover, the commercial importance of making films became even more pronounced in the wake of their unwillingness to continue their previously gruelling schedule of such performances. After their 1966 appearance in Candlestick Park, they declined to tour and, as Mark Lewisohn's Complete Beatles Chronicle testifies, they subsequently made only a limited number of exclusive television appearances. Indeed, according to Lewisohn, the group made only four exclusive British television appearances in 1966. In 1963, they had made a staggering thirty-seven.1

Making films and internationally exhibited television appearances therefore became of paramount importance and when, in 1967, the BBC invited the group to perform as British representatives for the world's first global satellite link-up, Our World, they were keen to oblige, even composing an exclusive song (‘All You Need is Love’) for the event, which was seen by an international audience of over 200 million. As Beatles road managers/assistants Mal Evans and Neil Aspinall maintained in 1967, just before the release of Magical Mystery Tour: ‘The obvious alternative to touring was to produce their own occasional television shows which could be seen all over the world, in countries they had visited for concert tours as well as new countries they'd never got around to.’2 Indeed, it is tempting to make a comparison with the group’s most serious transatlantic competitor, Elvis Presley, who, by the early sixties, had also [albeit temporarily] forsaken live concert tours for a career in globally exhibited pop musicals such as GJ. Blues (1960), Girls! Girls! Girls! (1962) and Fun in Acapulco (1963). Whether the Beatles, or their advisers, based their career moves on those of Presley is a question that will perhaps remain unanswered. Nevertheless, despite the formal and ideological differences between the Beatles and the Presley films, it is important to acknowledge that their underlying economic rationale was ultimately identical.

Second, whilst the films clearly had the potential to generate ‘direct’ revenue from box office receipts and television exhibition rights, they also facilitated, to varying degrees, the sales of a range of tie-in products, encompassing such items as soundtrack records, sheet music, novelizations, gift books and any number of other novelty accessories. In order to understand the underlying economic rationale and generic mechanisms of the Beatles' four pop musicals (and indeed their one generic anomaly, the Let It Be documentary), we must first consider them in relation to other, extra-textual elements.

Thomas Schatz, in his fascinating article The New Hollywood? discusses the manner by which commercial American cinema has become increasingly dominated by tie-in merchandising, endorsing the idea that a contemporary production such as Batman (1989) is ‘best: understood as a multi-media, multi-market sales campaign.’3 Although. Schatz sees this trend as having evolved largely from the multi-media, success of such seventies Hollywood productions as Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977), the exploitation of tie-in merchandising is neither a new nor exclusively American phenomenon, and I would maintain that it is also possible to view the Beatles films as influential, if primitive, multi-media production concepts designed to facilitate the merchand­ising of products external to, and beyond, box office revenue generated by the film-going experience. This practice had, however, been implemented (albeit in a more modest manner) long before the release of any of the Beatles films, and indeed before the rise of the pop musicals of the late fifties, through sales of soundtrack records and sheet music. However, with the appearance of the first British and American pop musicals in the mid to late fifties, the practice of concurrently marketing a range of related goods became standard within the genre. For example, Tommy Steele’s 1960 vehicle, Tommy the Toreador, was designed as a commercial package which included,as well as the obligatory soundtrack record and sheet music, such diverse items as toreador outfits, puppets, bath mats and knitting patterns.4

However, although the Beatles certainly didn't invent this exploitative concept, their film productions followed a similar economic strategy, with the sale of soundtrack material obviously highest on the agenda. Indeed, all their films (produced and/or distributed through either Apple or United Artists) were released in tandem with soundtrack albums, EPs or singles which included for the most part music taken from, and frequently written specifically for, their contemporary film releases. Of these, A Hard Day's Night provided the richest source of soundtrack spin-offs and, while the British release of the film (premiered on 6 July 1964) was accompanied by the concurrent release of the soundtrack and single of the same name, there were also a number of other related record releases. The single ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ was released shortly before the film in March 1964, and there were two EP releases, although only one, ‘Extracts from the Film "A Hard Day's Night"‘, contained music taken from the film. The other, which was not released into the American market, consisted of songs from the soundtrack album which were not featured in the movie.

Such an approach usually fulfilled a mutually beneficial role for ever changing film and record production companies (in the Beatles' case, often different divisions of the same company) since one medium helped to generate profits for the other. Moreover, despite the fact that all five Beatles films are vastly different in form (compare, for example, the cinema direct of Let It Be with the fantasy animation of Yellow Submarine), the common thread of all the films' narratives (indeed of all pop films of the fifties and sixties) is the insertion of contemporary recordWhile selling specific records (and their sheet music) was obviously an important consideration for potential product sales, the films, like the vehicles of other contemporary pop stars, also generated the extensive sale of other tie-in products, such as Dell’s glossy film books, Sheffield's Yellow Submarine clocks, or Jaymar's Yellow Submarine jigsaw puzzles. Such artefacts were manufactured by agreement with the distributors and/or the Beatles' own film rights/royalties outlet, Subafilms, an offshoot of the Beatles' management company, Northern End Music Stores Enterprises (NEMS), set up by manager Brian Epstein in 1964 to deal with the group's film projects.5 And,although unquantifiable in sales terms, the films also helped to sell other non-film-related Beatles products, such as jackets, Cuban heeled boots, board games and wigs. Again, such products were manufactured by agreement with two merchandising copyright outlets, Stramsact and Seltaeb, companies initially set up by agreement with Epstein in 1963 and 1964 respectively.6

However, these two companies did not, at least for the Beatles and Epstein, secure the huge profits which they promised, and millions of pounds of potential earnings were lost as a result of two central factors, First, the deals which Epstein set up with the two companies were unfavourable, with NEMS initially receiving only 10 per cent of the licence fees paid to the companies for the use of the Beatles' name and likeness. Epstein has often been criticized for failing to establish a more favourable deal with the licensing outlets, but such criticism seems unfair when one considers that the economic potential of pop-related, merchandise was a largely unknown quantity in the early sixties-Beatlemania had produced a hysteria which transcended ordinary admiration and excitement, triggering a vast market for virtually any product which sported the group's name or likeness. Although one could argue that Epstein committed the cardinal managerial sin of failing to predict future pop trends, the speed with which Beatlemania. gripped the global marketplace was completely unprecedented. As former Apple film chief Denis O'Dell rightly maintains, ‘Nobody knew the strength of it.’7 Secondly, earnings were further diminished by the availability of totally unlicensed Beatles-based products (which reached unprecedented heights during the first wave of Beatlemania), because unscrupulous manufacturers and dealers could easily avoid prosecutions over copyright infringements by simply spelling the group's name as ‘Beetles’. Indeed, as Philip Norman maintains, by 1964, the hunger for Beatles-related ephemera was such that ‘the vaguest representation of insects, of guitars or little mop-headed men, had the power to sell anything’.8 While it is impossible to quantify the degree to which these products affected the sale of ‘official’ goods, one thing is certain: just as Schatz rightly sees today's youthful audiences as multimarket, multimedia consumers, so too were those who went to see the Beatles' films.

Following Epstein's death in August 1967, the Beatles did everything in their power to control their own means of production. Although the group's first two films were funded and released through the American giant, United Artists, they were quick to realize the potential economic and artistic benefits of self-ownership and, from summer 1967, they began to set up a group of companies which would eventually comprise the divisions of Apple Corps, their own self-financed production and management company.

As well as serving as a means of avoiding the then exorbitant rates of capital gains tax, the formation of Apple theoretically allowed the Beatles the freedom to invest in a vast range of different divisions: a record label, a tailoring and clothing retail division, a publishing outlet, an electronics division and a film division. The films division, Apple Films, was headed by producer Denis O'Dell and was specifically designed to finance and produce their increasingly important film and television ventures. The formation of their own film production company had a dual role. First, and most obviously, it meant potentially higher returns; second, it meant that the Beatles retained a greater degree of economic and artistic control over their product output. Magical Mystery Tour was the first Beatles production to be credited to Apple Films. Because of contractual and professional complications, their later productions, Let It Be and Yellow Submarine, were not totally financed, distributed and/or produced by their film division. Thus Magical Mystery Tour can be viewed as the single most ‘unadulterated’ production in the Beatles canon, a film which they personally controlled at almost every level of its evolution. However, the long and winding road to Magical Mystery Tour began three years earlier, with A Hard Day's Night.

© Bob Neaverson 1997 - 2008