The Beatles' Movies and Television Appearances: Bob’s Sound-tracking Paper

The Following is an adapted version of a paper I originally gave at the Soundtracking Conference on Popular Music in Film at Sheffield Hallam University, July 1999. It was itself adapted from material that first appeared in The Beatles Movies and other articles I published around this time. Before you read it, it’s worth putting a couple of things into context: Since this paper was first given, some things have changed for the better…the movies are now getting more critical attention than before, and barring Let it Be, they have become increasingly visible and available. Back in 1999, however, there was a slightly different cultural climate, so if some of it sounds a bit like an academic ‘rant,’ you’ll have to forgive me! And, I believe, enough of it still rings true to this day for it to be worth your attention.  

 

Television tour documentaries notwithstanding, the Beatles starred in and/or otherwise contributed to a total of five films; ‘A Hard Day's Night’ (1964), ‘Help!’ (1965), ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ (TV movie, 1967), ‘Yellow Submarine’ (1968) and ‘Let It Be’ (1969, released 1970). Considering that the group's first long player was not issued until 1963, and that they had effectively ceased to function as a unified creative force by 1970, that's quite a tally. Yet in the wake of their mighty recording career, the Beatles movies (and, for that matter, their promotional films) have been largely overlooked by the critical establishment. While some would maintain that this is not particularly surprising (the Beatles were, after all, primarily a recording outfit), their comparative abandonment within film history has not been aided by the group's own relative disinterest in discussing the films, poor availability in the home video market, and the auteurist bias which still pervades much film history. As such, the only two Beatles films which tend to get discussed with any seriousness are Richard Lester's ‘A Hard Day's Night’ (1964) and ‘Help!’ (1965). I find this situation dismaying. It is dismaying partly because the Beatles films constituted a vital part of the group's success in Britain and America and, perhaps more importantly, because they have since exerted an enormous influence over subsequent pop musicals and videos. From a broader angle, the films were also important to the sustained American investment in British cinema of the sixties, a period in which British film blossomed in both a critical and commercial sense. But for the most part, they seem almost to have been written out of history, revered by fans yet acknowledged only in passing by the majority of film historians and music journalists, and rarely investigated or discussed in much depth. In this paper I want to look at the films in some detail, considering both the importance and the influence of the Beatles' film‑making ventures from both formal and ideological perspectives.

How then, were films important to the Beatles' career? From a purely pragmatic economic perspective, making films for international distribution was the easiest and most cost‑effective way to ensure consistent global exposure and 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 far less time‑consuming for a group of the Beatles' international stature. The commercial importance of making films became considerably accentuated in the wake of their unwillingness to tour after the now notorious 1966 concert in Candlestick Park. Moreover, by 1966 they had all but given up making exclusive television appearances as a means of plugging their latest single releases, relying instead upon supplying television stations with their own self produced promo clips. Indeed, although the aesthetic lineage of contemporary pop video can arguably be traced back to the animated shorts of Oskar Von Fischinger, the Beatles were certainly pioneers of the independently produced pop promo, and from 1965 onwards a considerable number of the group's releases were accompanied by promotional videos and films. Making feature films and promos therefore became of paramount importance from the mid sixties, and the inception of their Apple empire in 1967 was partly instrumental to this end, including, amongst its many departments, a film division headed by production executive Denis O'Dell, who had previously worked with the group as associate producer of ‘A Hard Day's Night’ and with John Lennon on ‘How I Won the War,’ one of the first ‘solo’ Beatle film projects.

Moreover, as well as acting as an intrinsic source of box office revenue, the films also facilitated the sales of a number of other licensed tie‑in products external to the cinema‑going experience. In his article ‘The New Hollywood,’ Thomas Schatz examines the rise of this trend, and endorses the notion that a contemporary blockbuster such as ‘Batman’ is ‘best understood as a multi‑market, multi‑media sales campaign.’ 1 While Schatz rightly sees this ongoing trend as having been influenced by the enormous synergetic success of the seventies Hollywood blockbuster (particularly those of Spielberg and Lucas), the exploitation of tie‑in merchandising is neither a new nor exclusively American phenomenon, and although obviously primitive by comparison to today's slickly engineered ‘high concept’ pictures, it is also possible to view the Beatles movies as multi‑marketing tools, designed, at least in part, to generate substantial profit beyond box office returns. Indeed, while sales of recordings and sheet music were obviously highest on the agenda (in fact United Artists agreed to finance ‘A Hard Day's Night’ predominantly so that they would get soundtrack rights), 2 there were a considerable number of other licensed film‑related products marketed, particularly in the case of ‘Yellow Submarine,’ which boasted jigsaws, Halloween costumes, alarm clocks, mobiles, and, of course, Corgi's recently revived die‑cast replicas. Although the Beatles movies can hardly lay claim to originating this exploitative approach, they were, like the ever‑popular Bond films, certainly important forerunners.

How though, did the films ‘work’ upon their audience? From a purely ideological perspective, the movies were obviously instrumental in developing and cementing the Beatles' international popularity. It is not for this piece to provide detailed textual analyses, but it should be noted that the films, perhaps more than any other broadcast media, were vital in communicating and showcasing the group's ever changing array of images, attitudes, ideas and musical styles. As well as re‑affirming their recently aquired stature as internationally recognised recording artists, ‘A Hard Day's Night’ helped to disseminate their then current visual ‘look’ to a global audience, and developed their identities as four individuals (rather than a ‘four headed monster’) who were by turns amusing, witty, sarcastic, profound and compassionate. In short, it imbued them with the individual personas so vital to the star‑audience relationship, something developed, in a variety of different guises, in their subsequent cinematic outings. While their early identity was to some extent consolidated in the fiction fantasy of ‘Help!,’ their next film, the self‑directed (and much criticized) ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ crystallized their recently developed role as psychedelic figureheads of the emerging counter‑culture. This was again consolidated, albeit in a somewhat more accessible and sentimental manner, by the benevolent, peace loving caricatures of the ‘Yellow Submarine’ cartoon, while the ‘Let It Be’ documentary presented a group of taciturn philosophers who, having turned the full musical circle, were now in an advanced state of personal (and, to some extent) professional decay. Indeed, although the group had achieved a remarkable amount of international success prior to their forays into film, my suspicion is that the phenomenon of Beatlemania could not and would not have been either as substantial or as long‑maintained without the identificatory process afforded by cinema.

However, as well as serving an important role within the Beatles' own career, the films have also generated broader influence. Economically and stylistically, the success of the first two films, ‘A Hard Day's Night’ and ‘Help!’ yielded considerable impact on the British and American film and television industries. Indeed, the international success of ‘A Hard Day's Night’ contributed greatly to the influx of American capital into British film production throughout the sixties, and as Robert Murphy has commented, the collective impact on the US market of such successful American investments as the Bond films, ‘Tom Jones’ (1963) and ‘A Hard Day's Night’ ‘changed attitudes towards Britain, fostering a belief that London, rather than Paris or Rome or Hollywood, was the place in the world to make a film.’³ Indeed, by 1967, around 90 percent of British productions had some American backing. Consequently, this investment made considerable impact upon the ever increasing production and distribution of British pop musicals and, in turn, upon the increasing profitability of the British recording industry in other territories, particularly America. As Kevin J. Donnelly has rightly noted, ‘The influx of American money and interest in Britain coincided with an unprecedented explosion of British popular music, the Beatles spearheading “the British invasion” of the US and Beatlemania signifying the power of the new pop music culture.’ 4

Indeed, although the notorious ‘British invasion’ was beginning to take place in America (through the Beatles) before either they or any other British pop artiste had produced a successfully exportable film, it is certainly true that the group's first two films, together with such imitative productions as John Boorman's ‘Catch Us If You Can’ (aka ‘Having a Wild Weekend’) (1965) played a significant yet frequently overlooked role in the dissemination of British pop throughout America. Indeed, despite the increasingly concentrated and integrated nature of the contemporary media, there has always been something of a symbiotic relationship between the film and record industries, and I would maintain that without the popularity of ‘A Hard Day's Night’ and the subsequent imitations which its success encouraged, the British music industry would never have attained such a commanding position in America or, for that matter, have retained it within its homeland. This, as I have already mentioned, is a highly contentious issue, but it is a general truism that the national ‘flattery’ of winning over foreign endorsement (especially in the US) frequently functions as a promotional stimulus for domestic audiences, and ‘A Hard Day's Night’ was certainly central to the consolidation of the Beatles' and, by implication, the British pop industry's international approval abroad.

However, as well as compounding the success of the ‘British invasion’ and heralding a clutch of copycat movies, the first two Beatles films also exerted an important and lasting influence upon both British and American television. The most contemporaneously popular of these was undoubtedly the highly successful ‘Monkees’ television show, which, from its inception in 1966, shamelessly exploited the style of the Lester movies, and featured a four piece ‘bubblegum’ pop group whose coldly manufactured ‘zaniness’ was blatantly modelled on the Beatles' early presentation. ‘The Monkees,’ however, came and went. The most lasting legacy of the Lester movies has undoubtedly been their formal influence upon the visual language and aesthetic values of the pop video.

Prior to ‘A Hard Day's Night,’ the majority of British and American pop musicals had relied upon the long established tradition of song performance derived from the classical Hollywood musical. In the contemporaneous vehicles of Elvis Presley and Cliff Richard, the genre's central musical sequences were inevitably based around the presentation of lip‑synched ‘performances’ of songs by a solo singer which, often combined with minimal onscreen backing sources (for example, in the case of the Presley cycle, his guitar), essentially attempted to articulate the illusion of ‘real,’ diegetic performance. Although such performances were usually, and often necessarily, accompanied by non‑diegetic backing (the ‘unseen’ accompaniment), the underlying importance of this aesthetic was to reproduce the illusory spectacle of performance, as if to reassure the audience of the artist's ‘authenticity.’ ‘A Hard Day's Night’ changed all that, and was arguably the first film of its genre to fully realize the illustrative potential of pop music. While the movie does boast a good quota of more conventional ‘performances,’ the ‘Can't Buy Me Love’ sequence midway through the narrative (which marries the song with footage of the group cavorting in a playing field) broke entirely with conventional approaches and, in the process, freed the musical number from its traditional generic slavery. Indeed, Lester, perhaps prompted by his own surreal humour, allowed the pop song the opportunity to work in a similar manner to that of conventional incidental music, as an abstract entity capable of emotionally punctuating action which is not tied to performance.

This realization formed an important aesthetic precedent for subsequent pop musicals (including those of the Beatles), and, perhaps most significantly, pop video, which the group themselves helped pioneer from 1965 with the semi‑diegetic promos shot by Joe McGrath for ‘I Feel Fine,’ ‘Daytripper,’ ‘We Can Work It Out,’ ‘Ticket to Ride’ and ‘Help!’ The McGrath promos are important for two reasons. Financed by the Beatles' management agency, NEMS, they were the first independently produced pop promos made specifically for international distribution, thus pre‑empting the arrival of the contemporary pop video age. Significantly, their style also anticipated that of contemporary video in their rejection, and partial mockery of, the conventional performance aesthetic favoured by contemporaneous shows such as ‘Top of the Pops’ (1964) and “Ready Steady Go!” While it would be unfair to suggest that they reject performance out of hand (all feature lip‑synching), they seem determined to break from the ‘realism’ of ordinary ‘TV show’ performance. Indeed, they are shrewdly prepared to trade the ‘authenticity’ of credible performance for visual dynamics via the non‑diegetic positioning of Starr (in ‘I Feel Fine’ he rides an exercise bicycle, in ‘Help!’ he wields an umbrella!), and the knowing delight the others take in deliberately mis‑timing their cues. However, the totally illustrative and conceptual use of music pioneered by Lester in ‘A Hard Day's Night’ was later developed by other pop movies and promos and, of course, by the Beatles themselves. While the self‑directed ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ contained a number of conceptual musical sequences, Lester's influence is again apparent in the Beatles promos directed by both Michael Lindsay‑Hogg and Swedish director Peter Goldmann, whose highly influential 1967 promos for Lennon's ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and McCartney's ‘Penny Lane’ were totally conceptual. Indeed, without the initial break with performance heralded by the Lester films, the history of pop video could well have developed very differently and it is perfectly possible that had the illustrative potential of the medium never been realized and popularized, the existence of the pop promo could well have been condemned to an obscure footnote in histories of sixties television. In this sense the Lester movies established an aesthetic precedent which was to become central to a medium external to the one from which they evolved.

Although critically slated in its day, ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ has also been influential in its own ways. As well as its importance to the development of pop video, the film's radical rejection of conventional narrative logic helped to establish a precedent for later pop movies such as the Monkees' ‘Head’ (1968), Frank Zappa's self‑directed ‘200 Motels’ (1971), the Who's ‘Tommy’ (1975) and Led Zeppelin's ‘The Song Remains the Same’ (1976). As Andy Medhurst rightly notes, ‘The sacrificing of narrative also meant the sacrificing of audiences as the Beatles found to their cost with the bemused and hostile reaction which greeted ‘Magical Mystery Tour.’ Yet after this radical mid‑sixties break, there was no going back to the more accessible naiveties of ‘Live It Up’ (1963) or ‘The Golden Disc’ (1958). Not that is, if the films were to have any shred of credibility.’ 5 Perhaps, then, the film's single greatest achievement is that it played a key role in de‑institutionalizing a genre which, to all intents and purposes, had been enslaved by the essentially conventional narrative form and predominantly conformist morality of previous pop musicals.

However, apart from its key role in radicalizing the aesthetics of its genre, one might also argue that the formal and generic properties of ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ influenced, or at least pre‑dated, other genres of film and television. Ian MacDonald, who like Medhurst is one of the few critics to recognize (albeit in passing) the film's importance, sees its concept as a prototype of the road movie genre which was inaugurated some two years later with the release of Dennis Hopper's ‘Easy Rider’ (1969). 6  Links can also be made with British television of the late sixties and early seventies, and I would argue that elements of the film were influential upon the style of comedy series such as ‘Marty’ (1968‑69) and ‘Monty Python's Flying Circus’ (1969‑74). Indeed, if elements of the film's surreal humour were partly inspired by programmes such as ‘At Last The 1948 Show’ (written in part by pre‑Python  fledglings John Cleese and Graham Chapman), it might also be fair to acknowledge the formal influence of the Beatles' film upon the Pythons. This is particularly evident in the second series of ‘Monty Python's Flying Circus’ (1970), in which the constant use of the non‑diegetic insert of the applauding crowd seems directly lifted from ‘Magical Mystery Tour.’ Furthermore, Terry Gilliam's inventive surreal animation is also highly reminiscent of that used in both ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ and ‘Yellow Submarine’ and in the second series, the ‘Blackmail’ sketch makes exactly the same use of the animated ‘censored’ sign as ‘Magical Mystery Tour's’ strip club sequence. Some years later, when the comedy team had branched into full‑length features, the Beatles' influence again remained apparent, and the grotesquely amusing exploding gourmand sketch in ‘The Meaning of Life’ (1983) is clearly reminiscent of Aunt Jessie's famous spaghetti shovelling dream sequence in ‘Magical Mystery Tour.’ That elements of the Beatles' film should have influenced the Pythons is perhaps unsurprising. In the years following their split, various members of the group have been instrumental in supporting and/or collaborating with the comedy team. While Starr made a brief cameo appearance in a 1972 edition of the show, Harrison's film production company, Handmade, was responsible for financing a number of Python related projects. The most notorious of these was undoubtedly their biblical satire, ‘The Life of Brian’ (1979), which the ex‑Beatle rescued from abandonment when the subject matter proved too controversial for EMI, the film's original financiers. Harrison also appeared fleetingly in Eric Idle's good natured and intermittently hilarious spoof documentary ‘The Rutles’ (1978), which also featured brilliantly observed compositions by Neil Innes who, as a key member of the Bonzo Dog Band, had himself made a guest appearance in ‘Magical Mystery Tour.’

‘Yellow Submarine’ has also been influential in its own ways. As well as colouring the eclectic iconography of Gilliam's animation and proving a remarkably successful forerunner to today's product‑oriented blockbusters, its chief contemporaneous contribution to British film culture lay in ‘fostering a new subculture that Mark Langer has called “animatophilia.”  In a 1994 article for ‘Sight and Sound,’ Leslie Sharman traces the influences of the film and maintains that it was instrumental in popularizing animation within art‑house exhibition, its success encouraging programmers to buy in independent animated shorts which would otherwise have remained largely unseen outside the festival circuits. 7 Indeed, as Sharman notes, the interest garnered by the film instigated a boom in animation production which resulted in ‘Yellow Submarine's production studio, TVC, becoming ‘one of the first large‑scale training grounds for young filmmakers, including Diane Jackson, who was later to make “The Snowman.”’ 8 

Bearing all this in mind, it is somewhat ironic that the Beatles' most ‘decorated’ film, the oscar‑winning ‘Let It Be,’ should, in some ways, be the most formally derivative. Indeed, if the animated pop musical feature that was ‘Yellow Submarine,’ can be described as one of the most formally adventurous British films of the sixties, then the lineage of the Beatles' final film is much easier to discern, its minimalist verite approach clearly reminiscent of the American direct cinema of Richard Leacock, the Maysles and D.A Pennebaker, whose masterpiece, the evergreen ‘Don't Look Back’ (1967) exerted enormous influence over the pop documentary. That said, making the documentaries of their progress was certainly nothing new to the Beatles, and some three years before the release of “Don’t Look Back” had commisioned the Maysles brothers to document their first US visit in 1964 for the TV film, “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah” (or, in the states as “What’s Happening”). This film, a co-production between the Maysles company, Granada and NEMS, charts the rehearsals and build up for their famous appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, in a manner that foreshadows Let It Be. 9

However, what ‘Let It Be’ lacks in originality, it more than makes up for in voyeuristic magnetism. Although it is the only Beatles film to have thus far bypassed a British home video release, it is in some respects the most absorbing of the five films, its fly‑on‑the‑wall approach providing a fascinating, if harrowing (and flawed) insight into the group's personal and musical relationships as they struggle desperately to find a new direction. This interest was certainly not lost on contemporary fans, who flocked to cinemas despite the general hostility of press reviews. Today the film's cultural status rests largely with its claim to ‘historical significance,’ as the only extensive footage of the group in rehearsal/studio mode. Stripped of this trump card one suspects that the film would not command the same degree of reverence amongst the new generations of hardcore Beatles fans who scour British record fairs in search of pirate copies. However, timing was always one of the Beatles' great strengths, and as one reviewer rightly observed upon its original (and long delayed) cinematic release, ‘Let It Be’ is ‘instant history,’  a  comment which currently seems paradoxically ironic; although substantial excerpts of the film (together with some outtakes) were utilized in the ‘Beatles Anthology’ series, its lack of commercial availability has to some extent depleted its potential to be reassessed by contemporary critics and audiences as an important cultural artefact.

With the Beatles' official split in 1970 came the end of the world's most successful recording outfit. Yet the visual and musical language of the films is still widely prevalent throughout pop culture, from the postmodern bricolage of “Britpop” fashion and musical pastiche, the narratives of such modern pop musicals as the heavily Lester influenced “Spiceworld,” and perhaps most importantly, in the non-stop global jukebox that is MTV.

Significantly perhaps, the Beatles’ demise paralleled the decline of large scale investment into British cinema. The degree to which the Beatles' split influenced this decline is obviously limited, but while it has often been rather reductively explained as the result of the internal schisms, declining incentives and diminishing returns which characterized such late sixties productions as ‘Modesty Blaise’ (1967) ‘Performance’ (1968‑released 1970), and ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ (1968), it might also be worth considering the indirect influence of the group's split on this phenomenon. On a purely cinematic level, their demise meant that there was one less group of highly bankable British stars for the picking. Yet if the Beatles had never set foot in a movie studio, I suspect their split would still have made yielded some impact on foreign investment into British film.

After all, at the epicentre of America's sustained investment in British cinema was not only the home‑grown talents of the film industry, but from a broader perspective, the country's fashionableness as a mecca of exportable pop culture, which also encapsulated fashion, design, photography, the fine arts and, perhaps most importantly, pop music (most importantly, because pop was the most widely disseminated and ‘inescapable’ of these media, especially in America, where from 1964 it reverberated around the country as a stern and omnipotent warning to financiers that Britain's new found cultural status was not to be ignored). Throughout the sixties, the Beatles were so much the nucleus of the cultural revolution that it is almost impossible to imagine it ever having happened without them. Although America's first major investments of the decade predated the group's international success by a whisker, one might argue that their international popularity was a key factor in sustaining Britain's perceived cultural credibility throughout the decade. Indeed as Richard Lester maintains, ‘It is hard to overestimate the grip of the fab four on the popular imagination of the time.’10 After all, directly or otherwise, the group were key players in virtually every successfully exported and/or innovative popular artistic medium of their age, not only as film stars and film‑makers, but as models for the newly‑emerging Carnaby Street fashions, as photographic subjects for David Bailey, Dezo Hoffmann, Richard Avedon and Robert Freeman, as key conspirators in the marriage of fine art and pop, and of course as writers and performers of the most widely exported and distributed music in history. Discussing the withdrawal of American funding in the early seventies, ‘Hard Day's Night’ producer Walter Shenson explained that ‘this place no longer makes news that is of interest to the world. When society is under stress or going through change, the outlines of what's happening are unfamiliar and exciting and the artists are under pressure to react to it all. When we are over‑familiar with what has been happening, all that is left is a hangover.’11 Some would argue that Britain has never fully recovered.

The Beatles movies will probably never attain the status of their recordings, and the majority will doubtless agree that this is no great injustice. However, as I hope this paper illustrates, much of the Beatles' impact was, by necessity, derived from the marriage of music and film. It is, to my mind, a great shame that this obvious relationship and its formal, economic and ideological importance has been so seldom investigated and so frequently overlooked.  

© Bob Neaverson 1997 - 2008