I was digging around my music DVDs/Blu Rays earlier and happened upon Imagine, the John Lennon documentary from 1988. I watched it first at the big cinema on Lime Street in Liverpool (the Cannon?) and then many times on video. It got me thinking about all the other Beatles related films (not including the 5 actual Beatles films) I had on videocassette in the 80s. I used to record anything Beatles related, like all the re-runs of Ready Steady Go, and the excellent Granada TV programme from 1984, The Early Beatles.
The daddy of them all was The Compleat Beatles. I couldn’t begin to imagine how many times I watched this one, but I certainly saw it as the definitive Beatles documentary at the time! It must be 30 years since I last saw it though, and all I can really remember is Gerry Marsden showing how to Merseybeat up a Hank Williams song. I always thought The Rutles was a spoof of this, totally overlooking the fact that it was made 4 years after The Rutles. It was only a few years ago that I saw the episode of All You Need Is Love on which it is actually based, or large chunks of it is at least.
The other one that I watched dozens of times was Birth of the Beatles, a biopic that flirted with the truth on occasion. It was lightweight fluff and the Beatles themselves tried to block its release, but I enjoyed it. A few famous faces in the cast, with Nigel Havers as George Martin, Nick Cotton as George Harrison and a bloke off Playschool and Jackanory as Brian Epstein. Again, I haven’t watched it for about 30 years, but this time I can remember pretty much the whole lot, although it was many years till I learned what mashuganas meant.
A film made around the same time as Birth of the Beatles was the American film, I Wanna Hold Your Hand, starring Nancy Allen, Jimmy Olsen off Superman and the geeky bloke off Grease. It centred around a group of fans trying to sneak into the Beatles’ hotel in New York prior to their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. It was directed by Robert Zemeckis and is great fun.
I also had John and Yoko’s 1971 Imagine film on video (pre-recorded I think), but I had to be in the right mood to put that one on. And there was a TV movie in 1985, John and Yoko: A Love Story, with one of the McGanns as Lennon (I don’t think it was the same McGann that I saw in the play Lennon at the Crucible in Sheffield the same year) and Peter Capaldi as George Harrison. Playing George Harrison seems to have been a springboard to TV stardom.
Getting hold of the original Beatles films was harder, as they rarely appeared on TV. Eventually A Hard Day’s Night was released on video and then I got a double pack of Help! and Magical Mystery Tour. I taped Yellow Submarine off the telly, but I think it was missing the Hey Bulldog scene. And in the late 80’s I started seeing a girl whose brother had both Let It Be and Shea Stadium on tape, so I soon had badly copied versions of those.
The last one is something that I can’t find any evidence of its existence. It was a highly stylised biopic of Lennon made for TV in the mid 80s, as a tribute for some anniversary or other. I can’t remember much about it, but there’s a scene with a young Lennon being told a saucy rhyme by his Uncle George, and a scene with Jim Broadbent singing Crippled Inside. Google and YouTube hasn’t helped me on this one, but I’m sure somebody else must remember it.
Are there any other 70s/80s Beatles related films I have missed? And did anybody else seemingly spend the entire 80s sat in front of the TV with record/play and pause pressed down?
That Lennon biopic – was it Bernrd Hill (Yosser in Boys From The Blackstuff) as Lennon. I vaguely recall this. It was mid 80s I think, and (having seen it again later) seems to have been part of the elevating John to sainthood industry. It wasn’t all sweetness and light, but had a certain (Yoko influenced?) cleansing about it.
Yes, I remember the one with Bernard Hill in it (if that’s the one that Paul’s remembering.) It was broadcast on the BBC around the fifth anniversary of Lennon’s death. Utter bobbins, if memory serves.
Just checked the BBC genome site and here it is: https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/0ef9f6b0518c483ab6d72a429bdbb711
Yes, that’s the one. I was trying to remember who played Lennon, but couldn’t quite drag that one out of the dusty corner of my mind! It was pretty rubbish and very weird.
Edit (after clicking on the link) – there’s no mention of Jim Broadbent though, so either I’m mixing it up with something else (possible) or I’m mixing Jim Broadbent up with someone else (probable!). It does explain why I haven’t been able to find any evidence of it, when I have been using Broadbent in the search engines!
The BBC rather unhelpfully put “Let It Be” on a Saturday afternoon in 1982, I remember the date – Saturday, 27th November. No video player and football put paid to that. I was gutted.
That’s probably where your girlfriend’s brother got it from.
Channel Four and ITV were particularly good for 60s films around that time.
With no video player, I remember seeing “Head” at a ridiculous hour in the morning.
“Performance” and Janis Joplin seemed to be on all the time. Someone at Channel Four adored Janis.
The best biopic of The Beatles I’ve seen was “The Hours and the Times” (1991, strange title) which was about Lennon’s Spanish holiday with Brian Epstein in 63.
It was only about 50 minutes long.
The scene where he does the twist with the air-stewardess was brilliant.
I got a copy of Let It Be on DVD – it was that 1982 broadcast it’s lifted from.
I think a few others here may have the same version (from the same supplier)
See below, a reasonable copy of Let It Be circulates that was copied from the Laserdisc. Of course it will finally appear on Blu-ray later this year (or that is the intention)
The DVD I have has a second disc with around 90 minutes of outtakes. Not great quality though. I bought it from a stall in Spitalfields Market about 15 years ago.
I first got into The Beatles aged 14 in 1976. On consecutive weekly Tuesdays or Wednesdays in the summer the BBC broadcast A Hard Day’s Night, Help, Yellow Submarine and Let it Be. I remember taping the songs from Help! with a microphone held up to the TV speaker. Let It Be was a bit of a shock at that time. Remember watching that on holiday with my parents and brother in a cottage in North Wales.
Christmas 1979 all of the above 4 were broadcast together with Magical Mystery Tour and The Beatles at Shea Stadium, this was incredibly exciting. One year later when John died the BBC showed Help! that evening.
As mentioned above Let It Be was broadcast (for the last time I think) in 1982, a friend of mine at Uni had a TV with an approximately 3 inch screen that also had a radio and a cassette recorder connected to it. He could tape the TV broadcast in high quality, so for years I had an audio recording of the Let It Be film.
Otherwise I remember renting The Compleat Beatles VHS mid eighties some time. Can’t remember when I first saw The First US Visit, but was struck by how closely it resembled A Hard Day’s Night.
Had a boxset of DVDs that had poor quality transfers of Help!, MMT and The First US Visit bought early 2000s. For some reason A Hard Day’s Night was not included, but The Making of A Hard Day’s Night doc was! Bizarre! This may have been a German release, I certainly bought it in Switzerland.
https://www.ebay.com/p/3333147
I also had a German standalone of A Hard Day’s Night, this was dubbed but it had English as an alternative audio track. unfortunately that audio was out of sync with the pictures.
Now have all except Let It Be on Blu-ray (have a download that came from the Laserdisc) , plus the 1+ set, also Lennon ones from 2018 (Imagine and Gimme Some Truth), the other Imagine movie on DVD, also on DVD Get Back (Macca’s 1989-90 tour, directed by Dick Lester), another live Macca one and his video collection set (The McCartney Years) , plus many others as downloads including 60s stuff like Around The Beatles.
[edit] I also have the ones that came in the McCartney box sets over the last decade. Rockshow Blu-ray sold separately, otherwise the ones in the Red Rose Speedway box set are the best.
I watched McCartney’s video collection, or most of it anyway, last week. So Bad’s my favourite.
But I’d forgotten about the First US Visit, which also provided much for The Rutles to parody.
There was one on SkyArts the other month – John & Yoko: Above Us Only Sky.
I recorded it to watch at leisure later – when I did get round to watching I was quite disappointed. It wasn’t properly bad – it told the story it was supposed to (John & Yoko), but it seemed to take lumps of Imagine (both the 72 and 88 ones), and whatever footage was already out there and stuck it together. Yes. there were some extended bits, and some new bits, but it promised so much more than it delivered
Backbeat was a good film I thought. I think Ian Hart played Lennon that one and also in the drama/play/short film about Lennon and Epstein having their holiday in Spain.
I was just about to post about Backbeat. Great film with some fine performances, and the music played by a band led by Greg Dulli of Afghan Whigs.
Thurston Moore, Mike Mills, Henry Rollins, and Dave Grohl.
Not a bad little band there.
The music they played was a bit inappropriate though. The Beatles were not a 90s grunge band.
Saw that film inside Abbey Road studios btw (2004)
I think it was inappropriate in a sense, but also a bit of a deliberate statement. Genuine ’60-’61 vintage beat music would sound a little tame now, so they needed a musical form that carried the right kind of danger and energy for a ’90s audience. It’s odd but it kind of works I think!
I like the soundtrack album anyway.
I’m sure it’s been mentioned before in other posts, but the short drama Snodgrass written by David Quantick, features a cynical middle-aged Lennon in an alternate universe where he had left the band on the cusp of mop-top fame and reflects later on as they conquered the world but stayed in with the FabFour image.
[SPOILERS] Another film featuring an older Lennon who rejected fame is ‘Yesterday’. I found that scene really affecting.
There was also a Sky Arts series of shorts called Urban Myths that had one about Macca’s creation of that very song
There was a film called Birth Of The Beatles – a quick search says it was made in 1979. I do remember seeing it on TV around that time and my memory is that it was a fairly straightforward telling of their story. I seem to remember ‘Lennon’ using the phrase ‘toppermost of the poppermost’, which I hadn’t heard before, and thinking it was a bit naff.
Think that phrase was first revealed in Hunter Davies’ (excellent) authorised biography. Also see Lewisohn on Word in Attic podcast for more info about it.
No, in that film it was…
“where we going, lads?”
“To the top, Johnny”
“which top”
“to the very top” [whilst punching the air]
No idea why they changed it.
Shows I shouldn’t rely on my memory! Maybe I conflated that with the Hunter Davies book.
Braverman’s Condensed Cream of The Beatles, made around 1972 is an interesting artefact that seems to have disappeared off the face of the Earth (though it turned up recently on the Dangerous Minds site). I first saw it in 75 in a high school film study class, and was pretty knocked out. Neither animated, nor live film, it to my mind still shows plenty of imagination, especially when working with such (presumably) limited source material. Braverman’s style is one he seemingly made his own (he did the pre-title sequence for Charlton Heston’s Soylent Green and I’m pretty certain he even did about 30 seconds of work in the original Rutles film.
Apple must surely have had a minor hand in it – there are clips from the HJH films proper – so I’m kind of surprised if not a little disappointed that a cleaned-up version hasn’t been attached to any authorised releases yet.
It’s sort of viewable on YouTube – start at about the 1:40 mark (it’s been truncated of opening titles) – but it’s a terrible quality copy. Hopefully you might give it more leeway than the two numpty below-the-line comments.
Lennon Naked. Lennon Naked is a 2010 television biographical film focusing on the life of John Lennon between 1967 and 1971. It stars Christopher Eccleston as John Lennon and was directed by Edmund Coulthard
Cripes. Tread carefully with this one, as (just as it says on the tin) it features full frontal Eccleston. You have been warned.
It was a curious film, as I remember thinking Eccleston was far too old to be playing Lennon (he was in his late forties at the time) but he kind of gets away with it, just.
Yes, I remember seeing that. Lennon’s estranged father visits him in Weybridge and the awkward conversation almost develops into some form of warmth – until his dad asks him to buy him a flat. Lennon’s face falls and tells him to have a word with his office – and that’s the last we see of him.
The Compleat Beatles – yes, I remember that one. I probably still have the videocassette kicking about in a box somewhere.
I remember pre-internet (and pre-Anthology) days, it was actually really difficult to source Beatles footage. I definitely remember the main reason I bought The Compleat Beatles was to get the All You Need Is Love footage. Possibly it was the only way to get some footage of the rooftop concert as well.
I don’t think I even saw things like the Strawberry Fields promo and the Hey Jude “live” performance until Anthology came out.
Two of Us is a fan’s dream recreation for Lennon and McCartney’s last meeting at the Dakota – not very well done, to be honest, but strangely compelling https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MWxsgA-DJI
Nowhere Man is good for the characterisations. I think. It’s not like I was there or anything.
Do you mean Nowhere Boy?
If so, then yes that’s a terrific film. The recreations of the Quarrymen music are suberb and, while still exaggerated for dramatic effect, the emotional beats are all believable. It’s easy to simply consider the death of Lennon’s mother as just a bullet point in the Beatles story, but this film really drives home the emotional intensity of that event. The film is really all about Lennon bonding with his mother as a young adult, and while watching it you actually forget the tragedy that is just around the corner, so it’s quite shocking when it happens.
Nowhere Boy is good, some of the incidents were ridiculous though, getting beat up by Teds on the mean streets of Woolton. Ever been there?
Also both Nowhere Boy and Backbeat lose points for their portrayal of McCartney as the much lesser talent, jealous, whiny and occasionally treacherous.
Paul also lost his mother at a similar age which clearly bonded them (as shown in the film), Lennon was completely fucked up from his childhood (also an absent father), his attachments to people like Epstein, Maharashi, Janov and Yoko clearly driven by this. He also lost father figure Uncle George at a young age *
* read or heard somewhere that the marriage of Mimi and George was sexless and that she may even have been a virgin, a sharp contrast to his mother who was apparently vivacious and showed extreme sexual abandon for the times. This contrast in upbringings must also have been rather difficult for him.
John Peel fronted a very strange evening in about 1984 about videos, on BBC 2.
It’s duration was about 3 or 4 hours and the first hour was top heavy with the Beatles and the Stones. Then Queen came on, and I turned off.
We had the Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields Forever and Hello, Goodbye promos in full and, with a pithy Peel line like “Ahh, those loveable Mop Tops, but whatever the Beatles did, the Stones did a bit angrier” (something like that), they went straight into footage of the Stones in Ireland in 65 (Santa Bring My Baby Back to Me), and the promos for Have You Seen Your Mother, We Love You and Jumpin’ Jack Flash.
It occurred to me then that all those promos were better than any of the videos from Duran Duran et al c.1984, and in 2020 they’re much, much, much, much better.
The one you never seemed to see back then was Paperback Writer.
I went to the Lennon play at the Astoria in London, and I still have the programme. Mark McCann as Lennon, but no Peter Capaldi as George. According to the programme it was Mick O’Connor. Tony Hawks played Ringo! I thought it was a stunning show, and I still have vivid memories of the front row seats and a half empty auditorium. This would have been late 1985, when the Lennon legend was still on simmer.
Yes, that’s the play. I was on the front row at the Crucible. There was a scene just before he interval where John, or somebody else, angrily threw down a copy of the Daily Howl. It landed just in front of us and my mate was trying to slide it closer to us with his foot when stage hand gave him a disapproving look and came and took it!
Capaldi was George in the John and Yoko TV film.
If you don’t have it, the 1+ CD/blu-ray set is wonderful with two full discs of all the promos etc., including alternative takes….5.1 mixes as well!
Good shout! Yes that set is rather terrific. Some of the Beatles repackaged stuff can be slightly messy (the Anthology set was all over the place… Let It Be Naked was ugly… and I don’t much like the latest remixed albums with the border added to the album cover – ugh) but the 1+ set is timely, stylish and comprehensive in its detail.
Yes I mentioned that above, it is great and I was very excited on release, never watch them though. I think it could have been improved in 3 ways, leave out some of the dodgy early black and white clips, put all in chronological order (Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields on different discs!) and they should have included the excellent “videos” from the films, probably weren’t allowed to for rights reasons, but particularly in Help! these are incredibly well done.
Oh look. It’s another Beatles thread.
I know! Wonderful, isn’t it? 🙂
“They were in a room with no windows in! And there were four guys of them!”
That’s how many times I’ve seen Compleat Beatles.
I was slightly too young to have seen much of it contemporaneously, and Sydney was far from any kind of epicentre, so the Compleat Beatles was very much the sacred texts. When Anthology came out and All You Need is Love bloomed from B&W to colourised, it felt like how I imagined the audience of the Wizard of Oz felt in the 30s.
This is a rather lovely documentary. I’m a no holds barred fan of MMT, regardless.