Our peerless film columnist Kathy Shaidle is away this week, and so I'm honored, after a stint as Tucker's guest-host, to step up and guest-host for Kathy, too. Miss Shaidle will return next weekend:
Forty years ago - December 8th 1980 - John Lennon was murdered as he returned home with Yoko Ono to the Dakota Building on Central Park West. He would be eighty years old now. I have written about him on and off over the years - "Imagine", his support for the IRA, my fondness for "Jealous Guy" and "Girl" and a couple of others - but it's a good general rule that the most interesting part of a celebrity's life is always the pre-celebrity years. So for our Saturday movie date this week I thought we'd screen Iain Softley's 1994 biopic Backbeat - the backstory to the beat, when the Fab Four were a fivesome trying to make it in Hamburg.
It helps, with any subject, to put a clock on it and a fence - to contain it within time and space, as last year's Judy Garland biopic did, boxing its protagonist into a short engagement in London at the Talk of the Town, at what she didn't yet know was the tail-end of her career and her life. For the Beatles, the formula is inverted: a short sojourn in Germany, pre-fame but not insignificant in terms of the group's development, and their brief encounter with Bert Kaempfert.
Nevertheless, my expectations of this picture were minimal, if only because, not for the first time, the tag-line sells it short:
He had to choose between his best friend, the woman he loved and the greatest rock'n'roll band in the world.
In other words, it's the old conflict between personal life and professional ambition which has motored every biotuner since the prototype Jolson Story in 1945. That movie ends in a nightclub - with Al Jolson, ostensibly having foresworn show biz for the little woman, being talked back on stage for a quick chorus of "April Showers" in the course of which his tearful wife realizes his first love will always be music and pushes her way through the cheering throng and into the divorce courts. Mass adoration versus human intimacy: it's no contest. "In the end, she's only a shag," observes John Lennon (Ian Hart) here. Backbeat winds up with its own eerie replication of the Jolson finale: "Twist And Shout" substitutes for "April Showers", but otherwise we've reached the same destination.
Mammy singers yield to crooners to big band swingers to rock'n'rollers, but the conventions of the musical biography remain unchanged. In The Glenn Miller Story, Glenn is obsessed with the need to play his music his way. So are Johann Strauss (The Great Waltz) and Buddy Holly: "I gotta play ma music ma way," he tells a man in a suit (representing hidebound conventions soon to be rendered obsolete) in the West End jukebox musical Buddy. In Backbeat, the Beatles in Hamburg find their musical identity with greater, er, speed. At the bar, a helpful stripper empties her bottle of intriguing tablets into the boys' palms, and suddenly the lads are on stage furiously ooh-ing and shaking their moptops. "Much better," decides John, still wide awake and staring at the bedroom ceiling hours later. "All the difference." This may be the most honest moment in any rock'n'roll movie. Most of the others go on about the "excitement" and "energy" of rock'n'roll; Backbeat just pulls it out of a bottle of pills.
At moments like this, Iain Softley's film is slyly subversive of its genre. For one thing, for a picture about 'the greatest rock'n'roll band in the world', it's amazingly offhand about the music. The Beatles chunter along through manky cover versions of Chuck Berry, early Motown, Johnny Mercer and "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean" - and it all sounds sort of about how you'd expect a band in a third-rate club on the Reeperbahn to sound. It seems perverse to take the best-selling pop group in history and only show them as struggling teenagers, but, in fact, Softley has done what few superstar biographers succeed in doing: he's imposed some dramatic shape on the celebrity curriculum vitae. This is the Beatles' story as seen through one of its footnotes: the fifth Beatle, Stuart Sutcliffe. Stu prefers painting but he's gone along to Hamburg because John's his best mate. Paul McCartney — a bit of a fleshy creep here — doesn't like the way John's mate plays bass:
"What about Stu?" he asks John.
"What about Stu?" says John.
"He just stands there," says Paul.
John and Stu are pals; but Paul knows that love can't buy you money. When a record producer wanders into the club during Stu's dopey rendition of "Love Me Tender", Paul pushes him aside and cranks the band back into rock'n'roll mode. Soon the Mister Lennon/Mister Sutcliffe on-stage vaudevillian cross talk in which Stu and John indulge has been recast as Mister Lennon & Mister McCartney.
All the biotuner clichés are in here, but drolly inverted. Most of us know the Feeble Five dispensed with the fifth and became the Fab Four. But it comes as a surprise, in a film about the Beatles, that the passion and commitment and artistic obsession should be not about music but about Stu's painting. In traditional music films, the girl gets in the way; here, Astrid rekindles his need to paint. Cheekily, Softley has used the Beatles as a vehicle for a film about someone who chooses the personal and modest over the public and glamorous. Softley by name, softly by nature, he's attempting to draw something more complex than the usual glib lessons on the vicissitudes of showbiz.
Macca never cared for it. He complained that, as tends to happen in accounts of the Beatles, he wound up getting de-rockified by Backbeat. Paul's particularly irked that the film took "Long Tall Sally" away from him and gave it to John, even though "he never sang it in his life". But Lennon's murder set the bias of Beatleographers in stone, and in this telling as in others Paul gets short shrift.
It seems odd to cast as Sutcliffe an American who looks so obviously American (Stephen Dorff) and as his German girlfriend another American (Sheryl Lee from "Twin Peaks"). Neither is quite right, although the relationship is rather touching in the end. But it doesn't matter, because the film is as much about Lennon as Sutcliffe. It relies on Lennon's asides to defuse the sentimentality: "Breaks your fookin' 'eart," he remarks, as Stu and Astrid share a farewell embrace on a railway platform. And it's what Sutcliffe's friendship tells us about Lennon that keeps us interested. So, despite glamorous American casting and a skewed angle on a familiar story, Iain Softley can't entirely erase third years of rock legend: Stuart Sutcliffe ends up a supporting player even in his own story.
~The Mark Steyn Club is now in its fourth season. As we always say, membership in the Club isn't for everybody, but it does support all our content, on everything from civilizational collapse to our Saturday movie dates. What is The Mark Steyn Club? Well, it's a discussion group of lively people on the great questions of our time; it's also an audio Book of the Month Club, and a live music club, and a video poetry circle. More details here.
Oh, and if you're really sick of the lockdown and looting and 'lection, we have a fabulous cruise coming up next year, which is just the best way to bust out of this thing.
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I just watched this again recently, and what with the state the world seems to be in I've found myself quoting a line from the Lennon character "It's all dick".
I can say I'm a member of the millions of people who were glued to the TV when Ed Sullivan presented the Beatles to America. It was an astonishing phenomenon. The adults all seemed to have mixed opinions of the whole thing (I think most were trying to put a friendly face on contempt) while everyone 18 and under seemed absolutely enthralled. I remember wondering in those days if anything quite like this would ever happen again. John Glenn orbiting the Earth and Neil Armstrong landing on the Moon came close I suppose. It was a "happening" as we used to say. It's funny, but the Beatle's debut was, ironically, possibly the last act of a commonly shared culture. Their early songs were amped up versions of sweetly sentimental things. The Beatles started well within the bounds of a benign shared culture. Thereafter pop culture seemed to descend steadily into nihilism. Music is now totally dispersed in countless niche expressions. Rock itself became more and more like the clanking of tank tracks than the celebration of friendly and enjoyable commonality. The Beatles may have been not only the last act of cultural commonality, but also the first act of mass cultural dissolution. Were we really "ready for a revolution"? "Imagine" a culture with nothing? It may be that the Beatles also ended up, like Stu Sutclifte, something of a supporting player in their own story.
What everybody really gets inverted about the Beatles is that Ringo joined them. They joined him, unceremoniously shoving Pete Best out of the way in their rush when they found their real ticket to stardom. Ringo was easily the most mature, unless you count George Martin (the actual 5th beatle), and because of his maturity he never needed to be flashy with his drumming. He's the most underrated popular drummer of all time. Everything he did was professional, always for making their business work, and never for himself. His version of 'with a little help from my friends' says it all in an inverted way about his own selflessness. Even when he finally really soloed in Abbey Road, it's a solo that exactly fits the song, and not one of those boring virtuoso cacaphonies. It's no coincidence that he was so prominent in their movies. Ringo was the anchor and soul of that band and he's really the one, again along with Martin, that gave the others the opportunity for such outlandish success.
Lennon was clever, McCartney tuneful, Harrison (ultimately) a fine lead guitarist with at least one song that even Frank Sinatra loved, and George Martin was skillful, but the soul of that band was the ever modestly but genuinely inventive Ringo, star of concert stage and screen.
Of course, all may disagree en masse if you wish :)
We must have been typing around the same time, Joseph.
My (non-musical) take's at the bottom of the page.
I was just entering my teens when the Beatles made their debut on The Ed Sullivan Show. Being at the time seriously into Motown and R&B generally, I dismissed them as funny-looking English guys who shook their moptops, went "yeah, yeah, yeah" a lot, did bad covers of American rock-n-roll, and generally made music for screaming teenage girls. I gradually came around. By the time they released their Rubber Soul and Yesterday and Today albums, I appreciated their talent - and when Revolver and Sgt. Pepper came out, I bought them. But with Magical Mystery Tour, I found their music sometimes still listenable and sometimes just obscure and strange. They certainly are as responsible as anybody for transforming popular music from tunes to be danced to and straightforward, comprehensible, generally romantic lyrics that one could sing along to to a would-be "art" form full of discordant, often synthesized music and obscure, pretentious lyrics mostly meant to sit around and get high to. Maybe if Stu Sutcliffe hadn't left the band, things would have been different.
I'm a little older than you and was something of a Beatles child prodigy if that's a thing. I was only 3 or 4 the first couple of times they appeared on Ed Sullivan but made sure mom called me in from my kiddy pool in the backyard to hear them, and badgered her to buy me their first two US released albums. I remember being very annoyed by the screaming audience which obscured the music. Also wishing Topo Gigo would be on the show too. A few years later I'd lost interest in the Beatles ... More of a Stones fan as far as mega acts of my teens were concerned... Though I do wish those records hadn't been thrown out in a clean up while I was away at college.
I built up a decent collection of LP's from the mid-60's to the mid-80's and held on to them even after I switched - like everybody else - to CD's. When I realized I no longer owned a turntable and the albums were just taking up space, I donated them all to the Salvation Army. The retro craze for vinyl started immediately thereafter - confirming once again my sort of negative capacity to foresee trends - and various friends remarked how it was too bad I hadn't kept them so I could have sold them online to connoisseurs. But I figured the Salvation Army needed the money more than I did. And at least I gave them away myself. I was never a big collector of baseball cards, comic books or action figures - and the ones I did own were not in mint condition by the time I was through with them - so I never experienced the horror several buddies of mine have recounted about going back home for a family visit a year or two after moving out to discover their irreplaceable - and possibly valuable - collections had been tossed out by their moms or dads in a cleaning or remodeling binge.
I wondered if there is any connection between this film, and the Oasis lyrics for Wonderwall " Backbeat, world is on the street that the fire in your heart is out..."
Or even Chuck Berry's line from Rock and Roll Music - "it's got a back beat, you can't lose it" - one of the many American R&B songs, if I'm not mistaken, that the Beatles covered in their early days.
Hav'nt watched this for years, but I recall one significant alteration. Stu Sutcliffe died from a brain haemorrhage, and it was suspected that the injury was caused after a brawl after a gig; Stu was kicked in the head by young toughs. The film changes this to a pub fight, where the injury was inflicted by a much older customer who objects to the youngsters. Hmm..
On a happier note, I can recommend Backbeat's soundtrack, a cheap CD and a rewarding one.
Kamala Harris says the Beatles are her second-favourite British Invasion band, right after the Tupac Shakur Five.
She remembers the Sergeant Pepper album coming out, when she was in college.
Kamala does think it's funny no one ever noticed that they misspelled "Beetles".
Eric, your post reminds me of Tony Blair when campaigning for the first time as Labour Party leader in the 1997 general election (successfully as it turned out) and reminiscing about how he well remembered watching Jackie Milburn (a legendary soccer player) playing for Newcastle United. Given that Milburn last played for Newcastle in 1957, that would have made Blair at most 4 years old! It's not what you know, it's what you claim to know!
Great review as always Mark. I have never been a huge Beatles fan but I have enjoyed the bands since who have emulated their sound, Oasis and of course Crowded House.
Not to go completely off topic, I hope Kathy is doing well and hopefully watching "The Thing" on the Svengolie TV show Saturday evening.
I always have to go to Google for the British slang. Manky. Even auto-spell doesn't know the word. Anyway, I became a Beatles fan at 9 when our parents would let us watch Ed Sullivan on Sunday evenings. I liked the Beatles. My brother liked the Kinks. Soon other groups were welcomed to our growing record collection. My wife and I and our first son were on our way back from California in December 1980. Somewhere near Barstow, I pulled over to the shoulder to take in the announcement of the death of John Lennon. That's when I gave up hoping for the reunion. I saw this movie years ago (on TV). I don't remember much about it, but I'm pretty sure I found it depressing. Anyway, thanks for the reminder.
Michael - perchance you are thinking of Grotty? Sounds best with a Scouser accent. Derived from grotesque and often prefixed to bedroom, flat (apartment), as in "they played in a grotty club in Hamburg". My Mum often described my bedroom as grotty. Manky could more appropriately be used for something "off", like bad food or an unsavory person. On the subject of Scousers, The Monkees' "Randy Scouse Git" capitalized on the failure of Americans to understand British slang, which is why "wanker" is more acceptable in the USA than the UK.
That song. of course, ties it all nicely to Ian Cory's comment above regarding Tony Bliar, as the Randy Scouse Git was, of course, the character played by Anthony Booth, (pater of Cherie and Father-in-Law of Tony) in 'Til Death Us Do Part.
Ringo Starr did the best, didn't he? Doesn't need to be loved like John and Paul. Richard Starkey, drummer, acting in the role of the Beatles' drummer. Turned up, knew his lines, played the role, (just like Tony Blair who was featured in Mark's recent Mark at the Movies, The Ghost), grabbed the loot, got the girl plus he got the K.
A true Working Class Hero.
I definitely agree about Ringo. He was truly impoverished growing up, especially being so ill that he did not get even a truly complete basic education. I think he was the most determined of the 4 to make the band work, because he believed it was do or die for him with his drumming. Then he even went on to other successes beyond his drumming.