The Beatles Solo Movie Ventures:
The Magic Christian

Only the most foolhardy commentators would claim that the Beatles’ solo film output matches that of their original five movies; comparing the solo movies is not entirely unlike attempting to compare their solo LPs with those made as a group. There is little to match the outstanding achievements of the group’s films in their solo movies, and it is, at any rate, a rather reductive and unquantifiable endeavour.

But that doesn’t mean that the various ‘solo’ film projects and appearances have not been  interesting, revealing, and at times genuinely astonishing. Just because they are not necessarily widely available and/or discussed, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t gems that are worth discovering for the uninitiated, or for those keen to re-acquaint themselves with movies that have largely been forgotten within film history.

One such film is The Magic Christian. Shot and released in 1969, just as the Beatles were entering their final year as a fully functioning band. The movie, based on Terry Southern’s savage attack on consumer culture, the film featured one of the most illustrious and gifted casts ever assembled for a British feature film. Alongside Ringo and Peter Sellers (who shared top billing), the movie also included cameos from Christopher Lee, Lawrence Harvey, Wilfred Hyde-White, Roman Polanski, Yul Brynner (as a drag queen), Richard Attenborough, John Cleese, Spike Milligan and Raquel Welch as the scantily clad dominatrix, the ‘Priestess of the Whip.’

The basic premise of the film’s plot concerns the exploits of Sir Guy Grand (Peter Sellers), the world’s richest man, and his adopted ‘son’ Youngman Grand, a former down and out, played by Ringo, and their experiments to explore the corrosive moral effects of money on the human race, and the avarice and greed that it elicits. A number of memorable ‘stunts’ are subsequently pulled by the duo, including bribing the Oxford team to sabotage the annual boat race, bribing a parking warden to eat the ticket Sir Guy has just been issued, and outraging the art market by buying and then defacing a (possibly) priceless Rembrandt portrait by cutting out its nose. The film’s climactic scene, however, is what most people now seem to remember about the movie…the sequence in which a million pounds is dropped into the vats full of the most disgusting cocktail of sewage, urine and pig’s blood and offered free to the city gents who take the plunge in order to scoop up the readies.

Few films in movie history can claim such a star-studded cast list…It almost reads like a ‘who’s who’ of cinematic talent of the age, and fewer still could have had so much potential for success. As well its starry cast, highly respected novelist and screenwriter Terry Southern had just contributed to Dennis Hopper’s hugely successful Easy Rider movie, producer Denis O’Dell had worked on such successful Beatles related movies as A Hard Day’s Night and was currently head of Apple Films (though the film was not an Apple Films production). Director Joe McGrath was already an old hand at directing comedy, having worked with the cream of British comedy talent including the Goons and Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s Show, Not Only…But Also, which had incidentally featured a couple of cameo appearances from John Lennon. Add a blissfully catchy McCartney written title song and the supreme wit of soon to be Monty Python stars, Graham Chapman and John Cleese as additional screenwriters into the mix, and one would think the film’s success would be guaranteed.

But the film sank commercially, partly due to the fact that the distributor, Commonwealth Films, underwent severe financial difficulties just as the film was in the throes of release, and partly because of largely negative critical response. Several critics of the day rubbished the film for being a rather vacuous triumph of style over substance, a deeply uneven series of vignettes about the blandness of avarice that makes its point in the first few minutes and goes nowhere, criminally wasting its starry cast in the process. Although the movie is essentially a fairly simple and at times heavy handed satire of human greed, it’s reputation as little more than a rather worthless exploitation film seems somewhat unfair in retrospect, and although this may seem like a rather ‘brave’ assertion to make given it’s current lack of regard, I think that its cultural and historical stature will grow somewhat over the coming years, and there are, in my opinion, a number of good reasons for this.

First of all, it’s a stylistically significant film. Along with such films as Easy Rider (1969) and The Graduate (1967), it’s one of the first non-musicals in movie history to feature a rock soundtrack to underscore its narrative development, predominantly performed by  Apple records new signing, Badfinger, with the addition of Thunderclap Newman’s Pete Townshend produced ‘Something In the Air.’ Along with Easy Rider, which was released in the summer of 1969 (Magic Christian was released in December of that year), these films pre-empted the trend for the use of both specially commissioned and/or pre-existing songs in movie soundtracks which would become so prevalent in the decades that follow and that continue to be so popular today. In this way, the film is an important precursor to movies such as Mean Streets (1973), Saturday Night Fever (1977) and GoodFellas (1990). Interestingly, the three Badfinger songs used in the film, ‘Come and Get It,’ ‘Rock of All Ages’ and ‘Carry On Till Tomorrow’ were all produced by Paul McCartney, who was keen to promote the new Apple artists, and help out producer Denis O’Dell.

As Denis remembered it when we were working on our book At the Apple’s Core a few years back, he had originally asked Paul if he could use ‘Yesterday’ for the opening sequence where Ringo is seen sleeping rough in Hyde Park, but Paul reluctantly refused, promising the producer that he would get him something similar. Although ‘Carry On Till Tomorrow’ is not a McCartney original, it’s fair to say that McCartney did deliver on his promise, as the song is pretty close-in spirit, if not melodically- to his 1965 evergreen.

In terms of its historical value, the film also offers a fascinating glimpse into late-sixties counter-culture. The film’s screenplay, by Terry Southern and director Joe McGrath, was loosely adapted from Southern’s own novel of the same name. Southern was, of course, one of the literary figureheads of sixties anti-establishmentarianism, and the film is certainly a venomous swipe at capitalism, avarice, greed and the ‘system.’ It’s also clearly significant that most of the duo’s ‘victims’ are usually older ‘establishment’ figures (the newspaper directors, the city gents who are prepared to wade in excrement for money, the traffic warden etc), and the film can be read as a kind of youthful counter-cultural treaty which refutes and satirizes all aspects of society which the admittedly fragmented factions sixties counter-culture collectively deplored. The aristocracy are presented as mindless twits in the pheasant shooting sequence where Sir Guy blasts the birds with military artillery. The educational establishment represented by the Oxford rowing team are hapless, fickle fops whose principles are quickly destroyed by Sir Guy, as are the group of company directors/ newspaper barons sir Guy addresses in the train sequence near the film’s opening.

Another interesting aspect of the film is the fact that it is one of the first of several projects in which members of Monty Python and the Beatles crossed paths. I don’t want to write too much about this here as I’m currently in the throes of putting together a separate article about the Beatles/Python connection (watch this space!), save to say that additional material for the film was written by fledgling Python’s John Cleese and Graham Chapman, both of whom appear in the film. While Chapman appears in an uncredited capacity as an Oxford stroke, Cleese features as the snobbish gallery official, Mr Dugdale, who sells Sir Guy the Rembrandt he goes on to deface. Presumably, they were both thrilled and flattered to be working with their comedy idols Milligan and Sellars, though as At the Apple’s Core stresses, Sellers was an immensely difficult man to work with during this period, almost closing down production on a whim at one point. But it’s fascinating to see these pillars of modern comedy collaborating for the only time together at the end of the decade, a transformative time in British comedy history, for while Sellers and Milligan represented the cutting edge of comedy and comic performance in the fifties and sixties, Cleese, Chapman and the rest of the Monty Python team would eventually usurp their position in the decade that followed.

Although the Pythons’ contribution to the film’s screenplay is hard to quantify (they are only really credited with providing additional screenplay material), their contributions reflect the irreverent, and frequently surreal satire that typified their work on the At Last the 1948 Show series, and which would become an important indicator of what they would do over the coming years in the Monty Python shows and films. Interestingly, there are some clear similarities between The Magic Christian and the final Python film, The Meaning of Life (1983), in the sense that both films are essentially composed of a series of vignettes, and both scornfully satirise pretty much the same things….class, tradition, wealth, and authority very effectively.

Although the Python film is much more surreal in the final analysis, the two films are therefore not dissimilar in spirit, and interestingly seem to divide audiences in a comparable way, varying between those who see it as a refreshingly irreverent and successfully realised satire and those that see it as a vacuous, directionless and exploitative vanity project. In the final analysis, comedy, perhaps more than any other genre, defies objective analysis…..in my ‘other  life’ as a lecturer I frequently come across students who simply ‘don’t get’ all kinds of comedy shows and films, including many of the most ‘decorated’ ones like Fawlty Towers and The Office. It’s taste. And many shows and films that are dismissed in their day get re-assessed later and rise immeasurably in stature. I don’t mean to try and reclaim The Magic Christian as a lost comic masterpiece that should be placed in the pantheon of greats alongside The Life of Brian or The General. But I think it does repay the time and money it takes to seek out and see and if you’re already a Python fan, you may just be converted!

© Bob Neaverson 1997 - 2008