Revolution:The Impact of the Beatles Movies

Although the Beatles' film history ends with Let It Be, the group's films, like their music, continue to exert significant impact and influence. The movies have received less critical coverage than the music, but in many ways they were as innovatory as the soundtrack material which accompanied them. Discussing both their collective impact and commercial popularity is, however, as potentially problematic as assessing their musical output in such a manner, not least because of the formal, ideological and economic differences between each film.

Indeed, although we have traced certain links between the films in the preceding chapters, the overwhelming impression which they collectively exude is one of stylistic dissimilarity and experimentation. Yet it is this stylistic diversity and tendency towards the experimental and the avant-garde which paradoxically links the films rather neatly together. From Lester's rejection of the performance aesthetic to Magical Mystery Tour’s refusal of narrative logic, and from Yellow Submarine’s untried cartoon pop musical feature format to Let It Be’s minimalism, a spirit of experimentation permeates the films from beginning to end, putting paid to the popular film-historical assumption that all movies funded and/or distributed by American companies are carefully controlled by their backers and ruthlessly moulded to conform exactly to the dominant narrative patterns and formulaic precedents of what has long been regarded by reductive film histories as an intrinsically ‘American’ film style.

That each Beatles film was so stylistically different from its own predecessors and from the classical pop musical in general is perhaps a tribute to both their makers' creativity and, from a broader perspective, to the Beatles' unrelenting desire to immerse themselves and their collaborators in experimentation. Unlike many other pop acts in history, they simply refused to stand still, to rest on the laurels of a successful formula; as Victor Spinetti so succinctly puts it, they were like ‘eternal students',1 always keen to explore uncharted territories and, equally importantly, able to inspire a willingness in their audience to go with them. Love them or hate them, there is no getting away from the fact that the Beatles movies are, on several counts, probably the most ‘deviant’ series of British films to attain mainstream commercial success on an international level. That the frequently experimental formal style and avant-garde sensibilities of the films should have been, for the most part, so commercially successful also flies in the face of the popular and reductive film-theoretical assumption that British cinema must ‘conform’ to ‘dominant' formal, ideological and distributive conventions in order to succeed in the international marketplace; and this, I believe, has been a significant contributory factor in the films' academic neglect. The films' success simply defies a formulaic answer, so rather than attempting to address the question, it has for the most part been ignored.

What, then, if anything, does the films’ success ‘prove’? A cynic would no doubt argue that it proves nothing, and maintain that the popularity of the Beatles' soundtracks ‘sold’ the films, and that the films were successful in spite of, rather than because of, their frequently radical formal or ideological properties. However, while few would deny that the Beatles were, because of their wealth and cultural status, in the relatively unique position of being able to experiment with hitherto untried formats and narrative structures, this argument fails to account for the fact that audiences could, had they so desired, have forsaken the films in the wake of their frequently hostile reviews, and bought into the group purely as recording artistes. This, as our study proves, did not happen, and I suspect that the films’ success is at least partly due to their audiences’ desire for - or at least receptiveness towards - experimentation and stylistic deviation. As I mentioned earlier, this certainly held true for the group's recording career, but whether this desire was unique to the reception of the Beatles' cinematic output remains an open question. However, if the films are placed in their historical context, it does seem that youthful sixties audiences in both Britain and America had a far greater tolerance and receptiveness towards stylistic deviation than those of the previous decade. Indeed, as Ken Hanke maintains, the ‘open contempt for the mechanics of formal film-making' exuded by such films as A Hard Day's Night was so effective precisely because it provided an aesthetic and ideological alternative to the ‘finely wrought Hollywood and ersatz-Hollywood British films’ to which audiences had become accustomed.2 They disposed of the ‘well crafted dullness’3 of much of what had gone before and, like the Marx Brothers in the early thirties, provided audiences with a sense of anarchic freedom which could not be obtained from the majority of contemporaneous British films.

However, whatever the exact reasons behind the films' success, there can be no denying that the Beatles movies have from a variety of perspectives exerted an enormous influence upon film and television and, at least as far as the pop musical genre is concerned, their influence has been so great that it is tentatively possible to posit pre-Beatles and post-Beatles analogies similar to those so frequently drawn by pop musicologists in relation to the group's recorded output. However, their impact also transcends their generic status, and I now want to take the films in turn and assess their influence in greater detail, from both a historical and a contemporary perspective.

Economically and stylistically, the success of the first two films, (and particularly A Hard Day's Night) had considerable impact on the British and American film and television industries. Firstly, the success of A Hard Day's Night contributed greatly to the influx of American capital into British film production throughout the decade; by 1967, 90 per cent of the funding for British movies was culled from the American majors. Indeed, as Robert Murphy has pointed out, the 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’.4 Secondly, this investment had a considerable impact upon the increased distribution of British pop musicals and in turn upon the increasing profitability of the British recording industry in other territories, particularly America. As Kevin Donnelly has 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.’5

While it could be argued that 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 Beatles; first two films, together with such imitative productions as Catch Us If You Can aka Having A Wild Weekend (1965) and Ferry Cross the Mersey (1964), played a significant yet frequently overlooked role in the dissemination of British pop throughout America. As we have discussed, the film and record industries fed off each other's successes and, although it is obviously rhetorical to speculate upon the fortunes of both the Beatles and British pop culture without the impact of A Hard Day's Night, and the subsequent imitations which its success encouraged, my suspicion is that the music industry would never have attained such a commanding position within America or, for that matter, have retained it within its homeland. This, of course, is a contentious issue, since the Beatles had already achieved an astonishing measure of national and international success prior to their forays into film. However, it is a truism that the ‘flattery’ of winning foreign endorsement (especially in America) frequently functions as a promotional stimulus for home audiences, and A Hard Day’s Night was certainly central to the consolidation of the Beatles’ and, by implication, British pop music's international approval abroad.

However, as well as compounding the ‘British invasion’ and heralding a spate of copycat movies, the first two Beatles films also exerted an enormous and lasting influence upon British and American television programmes. The most contemporaneously popular of these was undoubtedly the massively successful Monkees television show, which, from its inception in 1966, shamelessly exploited the style of the Lester movies (non-diegetic musical numbers interspersed with similar ‘chase’ scenarios), 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 the effect their conceptual and illustrative employment of pop music has had on the visual language of the independently produced pop promo, something that the Beatles had pioneered from 1965 with the semi-diegetic Joe McGrath videos mentioned in Chapter Two, which was later taken to its logical conclusion in 1967 by both the Beatles in Magical Mystery four and the Swedish director Peter Goldmann, whose totally illustrative concept promos accompanied the ‘Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane’ single. However, without the initial break with performance-oriented music heralded by the Lester films, the history of the pop video could well have developed very differently, and it is certainly possible that had the illustrative potential of pop music never been realized, the existence of the pop promo could well have been condemned to an obscure footnote in histories of sixties television. The Lester films 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 exerted considerable influence upon film and television. As well as its importance to the development of pop video, the film;s radical rejection of conventional narrative logic helped to set an aesthetic precedent for subsequent pop movies such as the Monkees’ Head (1968), Led Zeppelin's The Song Remains the Same (1976), Frank Zappa's 200 Motels (1971) and the Who's Tommy (1975). Indeed, as Andy Medhurst notes, ‘The sacrificing of narrative also meant the sacrificing of audiences, as the Beatles found to their cost with the bemused and hostile response 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 resulting films were to have any shred of credibility.’6 Indeed, the single greatest achievement of the film is that it played a key role in de-institutionalizing a genre which, to all intents and purposes, had been largely institutionalized by the essentially conventional narrative form and predominantly conformist morality of previous pop musicals.

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 predated 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 two years later with the release of Easy Rider (1969).7 Moreover, I would maintain that elements of the film were influential on the style of later television comedy series such as Marty (1968-9), and Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969-74). Indeed, if the Beatles were inspired by John Cleese and Graham Chapman's early work, 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. Moreover, Terry Gilliam's use of surreal animation is also highly reminiscent of that used both in Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow Submarine, and in the second series, the ‘Blackmail’ sketch makes exactly the same use of the animated ‘censored’ sign. 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 Pythons’ The Meaning of Life (1983) is highly reminiscent of the dream sequence in Magical Mystery Tour in which Lennon, dressed as a French waiter, is seen shovelling vast quantities of spaghetti on to Aunt Jessie's plate. That elements of Magical Mystery Tour should have been influential upon the Pythons is perhaps unsurprising. In the years following their split, former Beatles have been instrumental in supporting and collaborating with the Monty Python group. While Starr made a brief cameo appearance in a 1972 edition of the show, Harrison's film production company, Handmade, was responsible for funding a number of Python-related projects. The most notorious of these was undoubtedly their biblical satire, The Life of Brian (1979), which Harrison rescued when the controversial subject matter proved too much for EMI, the film's original financiers. He also appeared fleetingly in The Rutles (1978), the spoof Beatles television documentary written by Python stalwart Eric Idle and featuring music by Neil Innes of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band.

Yellow Submarine was also influential in its own ways. As well as influencing the Python team and proving a remarkably successful forerunner to today's product-oriented movies, its chief contemporaneous contribution to British film culture lay in ‘fostering a new subculture of what Mark Langer has called "animatophilia"‘.8 In a 1994 article for Sight and Sound, Leslie Felperin 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.9 Moreover, as Felperin Sharman maintains, 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 film-makers, including Diane Jackson, who was later to make The Snowman’,10

However, in the final analysis, the most extraordinary aspect of the Beatles movies is that they continue to generate both interest and profit. Like the comedies of the Marx Brothers to which they were initially compared, the films still entertain and engage and, for the most part, amuse in a manner which seems to transcend their period. Indeed, the current popularity of the recently re-released Lester movies in the sell-through video market would seem to echo this notion, suggesting that the films have found new second and third generation audiences. As Ken Hanke has so rightly said of A Hard Day’s Night, time has been kinder to the film than its original audience!11 For five films which were made with no intention of achieving a sense of permanence, they have dated far more gracefully than a number of their contemporaries, and there is no small irony in this. Lester said repeatedly in the sixties that he neither wanted nor expected his films to last.12 Today, he is justifiably amused by the irony of this situation, and although modestly accepting that he finds it impossible to be objective about his own work, he concedes that on the odd occasions when he has reviewed his Beatles movies he finds them more ‘endearingly representative of their period’13 than a number of other contemporaneous films. So why have these five films worn so well? The reasons, I believe, are both complex and numerous.

Although the pop musical has become an increasingly dying genre, the formal language of the films lives on in the non-stop global video jukebox that is MTV. That there have been no textual developments of equal significance since the Beatles films has helped them to retain their youth. Granted, video-makers have discovered and exploited all manner of new effects and technologies, but the bottom line is that the fundamentally illustrative, concept-based aesthetic of non-performance initially established over thirty years ago by Lester is still very much in place.

Also of importance is the fact that the fashions and range of images popularized by the Beatles have become strongly integrated into the post-modern collage of styles which pervade contemporary pop culture. Indeed, while the psychedelic style sported by the group in Magical Mystery Tour (and by their cartoon counterparts in Yellow Submarine) has returned to the centre stage of indie pop fashion, the mid-sixties look of the Help!/Revolver period (corduroy and suede jackets, sunglasses and leather boots) has also become integral to the look of many pop bands; and to scrutinize the visual style of popular Beatles admirers Oasis is to witness a perfect synthesis of fashions culled from different periods of the Beatles' career and reassembled into a bricolage of styles which evokes a disturbingly schizophrenic sense of undifferentiated time. Likewise, the influence of the Beatles' music has never been so prominent. The so-called ‘Britpop’ revolution of the mid nineties had at its core of inspiration a nostalgic aping of the Beatles’ abstract lyrical allusions and harmonic structures. Although a vast core of Beatles purists find the seemingly insatiable copyism of much contemporary pop to be at best tiresome, there is no doubt that the rise of ‘Britpop’ has, along with the well-timed Anthology series, refocused attention upon the Beatles' musical output for a generation who were not present at the time of its inception and dissemination.

That said, it seems that quite independently of the ‘Britpop’ revolution the films' soundtracks have retained an eternal youth, and this, I am sure, has been instrumental in the movies' longevity. George Martin's production was so advanced in its day, and has since been so perfectly and effectively conserved and enhanced by contemporary technology, that the ‘sound’ of the Beatles now seems far fresher than that of many of their contemporaries. Unlike the back catalogues of many of their sixties colleagues, the ravages of time have yet to catch up with the Beatles production; although most of their work was only recorded on four-track technology, the recordings have been lovingly remastered (with the cooperation of their original producer) and have retained a crystal-clear clarity of acoustic which has imbued them with a sense of permanence.

Beyond this clarity of sound lies the music itself, and it is ultimately the soundtrack compositions themselves which, more than anything else, have been central to the Beatles movies' evergreen popularity. The fact that they can be heard blaring from radios and televisions from Russia to Switzerland and from America to Australia has ensured that the music is very much part of the ‘now’. Analysing the reasons behind the enduring success of any cultural artefact is by nature a speculative undertaking, but I would suggest that the central reason for the appeal of the Beatles is partly due to their durability. Unlike a vast number of their contemporaries (and Bob Dylan springs immediately to mind), the songs of Lennon, McCartney and Harrison ran the gamut of lyrical universal abstracts (love, anger, joy, sorrow, regret, etc.) in a manner which transcends contemporaneity. What is more, their musical approach to songwriting and arrangement encapsulated a far wider musical panorama than had, and indeed has, ever been attempted within pop. As well as developing the germ of their beloved rock and roll into new musical styles and experimenting and pioneering a range of recording techniques hitherto untried in pop, the Beatles were masters of musical pastiche, and this, in my opinion, is where their musical longevity most profoundly lies.

Songs written in pre-existing styles cannot, by their very nature, date as harshly as those which are not and, although they were not necessarily designed with this intention, many of the Beatles' soundtrack songs (and particularly those which appeared in the later films) succeed so well precisely for this reason. That the songs were often more memorable than those of the genres from which they initially derived is extraordinary (the Beatles always had an uncanny, infuriatingly brilliant knack of not only capturing the essence of their chosen targets, but somehow inexplicably ‘improving’ them), but the bottom line is that soundtrack songs such as ‘And I Love Her’, ‘Yellow Submarine’, ‘Your Mother Should Know’ or ‘Let It Be’ are (respectively) pastiches of the latin ballad, the children's nursery rhyme, the music-hall number and the hymn. Indeed, to my mind those who constantly explain the Beatles' current ‘revival’ as the result of so much ‘nostalgia’ fail to see the whole picture; whatever else constituted their vast contribution to music, an important ingredient of their original underlying appeal across the ages was partly nostalgic in the first instance.

With the Beatles; official split in 1970 came the end of the most successful pop group of all time. Significantly perhaps, their demise also paralleled the decline of large scale investment into British cinema. The degree to which the Beatles' split influenced this decline is clearly unquantifiable, but while it has often been rather reductively explained as the result of the internal schisms and declining returns which characterized such late sixties productions as Casino Royale (1967), Performance (1968, not released until 1970), Modesty Blaise (1967) and The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), only the most foolhardy of commentators would ignore the direct and 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 an impact on foreign investment into British film.

After all, at the epicentre of America;s sustained investment in British cinema was not only the homegrown talents of Britain;s 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 music 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 fashionability 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 Beatles' international success by a whisker (for example, United Artists’ investment in Dr No occurred in the same year as the Beatles; first British hit single), one might argue that their international popularity was the single most important factor in sustaining Britain's cultural credibility throughout the decade. Indeed, as Dick Lester maintains, cIt is hard to over-estimate the grip of the fab four on the popular imagination of the time.’14 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, the group's American film 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.’15 Some would argue that Britain has never fully recovered.

Although the sixties have long been canonized as something of a ‘golden age’ in British film, the fact remains that the majority of the Beatles films have received less critical coverage and analysis than they deserve, despite their unwaning appeal. There will, I hope, come a time when that appeal will be matched by a critical interest which will, in turn, engender a historical recognition which eventually parallels that of their recorded output. My sincere hope is that this book will go some way towards stimulating interest and debate about these most overlooked and undervalued gems of British cinema, in my opinion the most thoughtful, anarchic and joyous series of pop movies of the decade that spawned them.

© Bob Neaverson 1997 - 2008