The 5 Essential Beatles Movies
It's British Invasion Week!
Welcome to Feature Presentation's British Invasion Week!
Taylor and I are spending the week in London, seeing the sights, some shows, a familiar friends to fans of FP. To celebrate, we've scheduled columns and podcasts dedicated to movies, television, and music from across the pond, from the best (James Bond) to the worst (Love Island) of British culture.
There's no better to place to start than with those four lads from Liverpool who took over the U.S., and the world, all those years ago.
Help! (1965)
An obscure Eastern cult that practices human sacrifice pursues Ringo after he unknowingly puts on a ceremonial ring (that, of course, won't come off). On top of that, a pair of mad scientists, members of Scotland Yard, and a beautiful but dead-eyed assassin all have their own plans for the Fab Four.
I'm fully aware that this "5 Essential" column is designed to highlight the best of the best and the absolute most important - I'm the one who writes the column. You're thinking that I should put A Hard Day's Night in this slot, and you're probably right. Pretty much everybody agrees that it's the best Beatles movie, therefore it's the most essential. But I was raised on Help!, and as a huge Beatles fan to this day, I can say that it's a direct result of that movie.
A Hard Day's Night is, by no fault of the movie itself, a low-budget affair intended to cash in on Beatlemania. A faux-documentary that shows the boys running around, teasing each other, and jamming out to some of their best songs, it feels real even if it's a carefully calculated romp.
By the time Help! came out just one year later, the Beatles were no longer a fad - they were here to stay. And Help! is a movie through and through, a big-budget, globetrotting, persona-cementing collection of music videos, linked together by the silliest plot you can imagine, all about a cult of bad guys trying to steal a ring from Ringo. It has the better group of songs (“Help!,” “You’re Gonna Lose That Girl,” “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away,” “and especially “Ticket To Ride”) and a more ridiculous batch of jokes, which is why it's an improved cinematic venture - the Beatles were improving as artists in every medium.
Yellow Submarine (1968)
The wicked Blue Meanies take over Pepperland, eliminating all color and music. As the only survivor, the Lord Admiral escapes in the yellow submarine and journeys to Liverpool to enlist the help of the Beatles.
After the success of A Hard Day's Night, United Artists penned the Beatles to a two-movie deal. Help! was the first movie, but nobody could quite agree on what the second one would be. Many ideas were brought to the table, including a Lord of the Rings film directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring the Fab Four, but none transpired. After a few years passed, they agreed that an animated film would be the best way to (for them) quickly and easily make that third movie.
In fact, the boys don't even voice themselves in Yellow Submarine, English actors John Clive, Geoffrey Hughes, Peter Batten, and Paul Angelis do the heavy lifting. The Beatles themselves only wrote four new songs for the movie (lifting most of the tunes from Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band) and briefly appear in a live-action cameo at the end, but the movie is most successful in capturing the essence of the Beatles, and that's all that matters.
It's the movie for the band's psychedelic era, a drug-induced Dr. Seuss variant, fun for the whole family but best appreciated by adults. If the ABC television program The Beatles was a Saturday morning cartoon, Yellow Submarine was a Saturday night cartoon, a midnight movie special destined to be rediscovered again and again.
The Beatles: Get Back (2021)
The three-part documentary series, compiled from over 60 hours of unseen footage, captures the warmth, camaraderie, and creative genius that defined the legacy of music's most iconic foursome. The series also includes – for the first time in its entirety – The Beatles' final performance at London's Savile Row.
The following previously appeared in my piece The Beatles: Get Back and the YouTube Rabbit Hole. It has been edited for clarity.
Peter Jackson’s restoration of over 60 hours of the footage that originally became 1970’s Let It Be film, now called The Beatles: Get Back, is so beautiful that it genuinely feels as though you are sitting in the room with them as they work out both the logistics of the Get Back project and their interpersonal issues. Nerds will complain about the digital noise reduction done on the footage, but the experience of sitting in the same room as them in 1969 is unparalleled.
For starters, the perspective you get on their creative process is unbelievable. You might, as I did, imagine them writing these beautiful works of art, alone, with a fountain pen, a notepad, and a cup of tea, as the poetry just flows from them. In reality, the total opposite seems to be true. It’s more like:
We need to write a song because we are supposed to have an LP finished in nine days and we don’t have anything! How about…when I found myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me….
We get an insider’s view on so much of their collaboration. There’s a lot of play, tinkering (perhaps even mocking) some of their older tunes while flowing in and out of others artists’ songs. George has a few songs, they get ignored. Ringo begins to plunk out “Octopus’s Garden” which will appear on their next album. Paul stresses about the impending deadline and works constantly to come up with new material. John cuddles up to Yoko and seems unbothered , if you catch my drift.
But that collaboration can obviously lead to conflict — and it does. We, as the modern viewer, know this session as the beginning of the end historically. But it’s also surprising how they seem to know it too. George briefly quits the band. They are constantly alluding to the fact that they will break up soon. Paul takes it harder than the others — at least openly. Yoko sits by John’s side, Linda and Heather visit Paul. You can’t help but notice that their lives are changing fast and The Beatles, as a group, are getting left behind. We all know that they didn’t last much longer. A rise and fall — all before baby brother George even turned 27.
I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978)
If they missed Beatles' first appearance in the U.S.A. they would hate themselves for the rest of their lives! So four young girls from New Jersey set off even though they don't have tickets for the show! The journey is full of surprises and misfortunes but the young ladies are determined to reach their idols.
Let's transition now from movies with the Beatles to movies about the Beatles. If you enjoyed the new documentary Beatles '64*, do I have the undiscovered gem for you...
It's February of 1964 and the Beatles have landed in New York in anticipation of their appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Beatlemania has swept New York City and the entire city is shut down, so when four girls from New Jersey want to see the boys with their very own eyes, they're gonna have to scramble their way through a ridiculous romp of illegal activities and crazed fandom. Directed, in his debut feature, by Robert Zemeckis (back when he was interested in stories and not computers) and co-written with his Back to the Future collaborator Bob Gale, it understands, better than any other movie, how the Beatles broke the zeitgeist.
Their version of Ed Sullivan gets it when he tells a handful of CBS employees, “I want you to be prepared for excessive screaming, hysteria, hyperventilation, fainting, fits, seizures, spasmodic convulsions, even attempted suicides. All perfectly normal. It merely means these youngsters are enjoying themselves.”
Although it was given a nice Criterion release in 2019, I don't think enough people know this one.
*I have to be honest and say that I didn't enjoy the doc very much, I thought it was too all over the place and generally kind of a mess when it should have been a slam dunk. But when that one guy tears up thinking about the first time he heard their music, wow, that's what it's all about...
Yesterday (2019)
A struggling musician realizes he's the only person on Earth who can remember The Beatles after waking up in an alternate reality where the group was forgotten.
The following previously appeared in my piece Yesterday (2019): The Best Beatles Movie.
I understand that the film is flawed, let’s get that out of the way. On top of the fact that it takes more than the average amount of belief suspension, the Ed Sheeran to Ana De Armas ratio is criminally lopsided, the Cordens and McKinnons poo a little too much on the sentimentality, and the fact that it sets up a “Wonderwall” joke that it never finishes is a complete breach of trust between filmmaker and audience. I recognize these flaws.
But there’s something about it that just feels right to me: the passion and love the movie has for the music of The Beatles.
There’s a moment about two-thirds of the way through the film that always gets me a little choked up. After deciding to launch his tour with his own rooftop concert, Himesh Patel’s Jack (who is notably charming in the film; he has a lovely voice) is visited by two people who have been following his rise to fame. They’ve been spying on him, investigating him, and we’re led to believe that they are suspicious of his songs and may expose him.
It’s a defining moment in the film. His rise to fame is all over, they’re going to tell the whole world that he’s stolen from a band no one knows.
They don’t.
Instead, they hug him. This unlikely duo, a British woman and a Russian man, are so thrilled that someone else remembers and can bring the music back. They’re not musicians and can’t remember some of the craziest lyrics nearly as well as Jack can, so they’re just grateful he’s giving the world this music. “A world without the Beatles,” says the Liverpool Stranger, “is a world that’s infinitely worse.”
It gets me every time.
Credit: Each plot synopsis comes from Letterboxd via TMDb.
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