All This and World War II (1975)

          This one needs a disclaimer. While the film All This and World War II is quite awful, taking a wrongheaded idea far into the realm of bad taste, the movie features a nifty soundtrack comprising covers of Beatles songs by noteworthy musicians. Therefore, it’s possible to watch the flick as a sampler platter for the songs, some of which appear via snippets and some of which are played in their entirety. The basic premise of All This and World War II is as simple as it is stupefying—using the Beatles’ songbook as the score for a greatest-hits survey of how key events during World War II affected Great Britain. The resulting juxtapositions of songs and imagery (newsreels, stock footage, and clips from fictional films released by 20th Century-Fox, the distributor of All This and World War II) are maddeningly literal. Helen Reddy sings “Fool on the Hill” over shots of Hitler during prewar days. Henry Gross performs “Help!” over scenes of Nazi tank commander Erwin Rommel pummeling UK forces in North Africa, as well as scenes of American President Franklin Roosevelt battling resistance from isolationists in order to help—get it?—the British. Sometimes, director Susan Winslow struggles so hard to match footage with tunes that madness ensues: Why the hell does Leo Sayer howl “I Am the Walrus” during combat scenes? And what’s the deal with Frankie Laine crooning “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” during a sequence celebrating American volunteerism?

          Yet the truly cringe-inducing bits involve generalizations about race and culture, such as matching the Bee Gees’ version of “Sun King” with Pearl Harbor and pairing Richard Cocciante’s weirdly overwrought take on “Michelle” with the liberation of France. To Winslow’s credit, every so often something works. Sayer’s plaintive reading of “The Long and Winding Road” works as accompaniment for harrowing images of London during the blitz, and Jeff Lynne’s faithful remake of “Nowhere Man” is a droll companion for shots of ousted Italian strongman Benito Mussolini in exile. Still, the basic flaw of this project—matching the Beatles’ peace-and-love tunes with war imagery—becomes painfully clear in the end, which is to say marrying the London Symphony Orchestra’s performance of “The End” with a shot of an A-bomb test meant to represent America’s nuclear attack on Japan. Just wrong. As for the handful of cover versions that add luster to the enterprise, including Elton John’s hit version of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” (listen for John Lennon himself singing the chorus), they are better appreciated outside the context of this misguided movie.

All This and World War II: LAME

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978)

          One of the Bee Gees’ catchy disco ballads, released a year before they conquered the world’s dancefloors with the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, was titled “Love So Right.” The song’s anguished chorus laments, “Maybe you can tell me how a love so right can turn out to be so wrong.” It seems apropos to paraphrase the sentiment when considering Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which costars the Bee Gees and ’70s rock god Peter Frampton: Can anyone tell why an idea so right turned into a movie so very, very wrong? It’s not as if there wasn’t ample precedent for translating the music of the Beatles into amiable motion pictures.

          During their ’60s heyday, the Fab Four appeared in several lively flicks powered by tunes from the Lennon-McCartney songbook. And if the Beatles were no longer a band by the time this project took shape, who’s to say a fresh batch of mop-topped kids couldn’t have carried the cinematic torch? Unfortunately, producer Robert Stigwood transformed the Beatles’ LP Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band into one of the most deranged flops in cinema history: Every frame of Sgt. Pepper’s is so mind-bogglingly inappropriate that the film is mesmerizing for the wrong reasons.

          Here’s the backstory. In 1974, Stigwood produced a London stage show called Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on the Road, which combined the Beatles’ music with a loose narrative. Three years later, Stigwood produced the movie and soundtrack of Saturday Night Fever, which made the Bee Gees into superstars. Combining two of his assets, Stigwood hired the Bee Gees to act in a film adapted from the stage show. He also recruited white-hot English guitarist/singer Frampton to round out the principal cast. (The fact that none of the leads had significant acting experience apparently didn’t matter.) Pressing forward, Stigwood hired first-time screenwriter Henry Edwards to pen the screenplay, then enlisted Michael Schultz, best known for helming a series of African-American-themed comedies, to direct. (Again, the fact that neither Edwards nor Schultz had demonstrated affinity for musical storytelling was disregarded.)

          Stigwood’s hubris was compounded by the choice to make Sgt. Pepper’s on a grand scale, employing gaudy special effects, opulent production design, and random guest appearances. A mishmash of clichés culled from the worlds of fantasy fiction and showbiz melodrama, Sgt. Pepper’s plays out like a fever-dream fusion of A Star Is Born and The Wizard of Oz. From the very first scene, the bad-movie die is cast. A title card announces that we’re in “August 1918, the tiny village of Fleu de Coup.” Against a World War I backdrop, we meet the original Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, an American marching band so likeable they convince soldiers to stop fighting. Returning to their U.S. hometown, Heartland, the band continues entertaining people through to the World War II era, and the citizens of Heartland decide to erect a golden weathervane in Sgt. Pepper’s honor.

          The now-aged musician strikes up the band for one final performance at the weathervane unveiling, then drops dead after a few notes. A generation later, circa the ’70s, four new musicians take up the Sgt. Pepper mantle: Billy Shears (Frampton) and the Henderson brothers (the Bee Gees). Barely 10 minutes into the movie, Sgt. Pepper’s is already buried in convoluted hogwash. Yet somehow, it gets worse.

          While an evil record executive (Donald Pleasence) seduces the young musicians with drugs, money, and women, the bizarre villain Mean Mr. Mustard (Frankie Howard) conspires to steal the original Sgt. Pepper instruments from a Heartland museum. Later, the musicians encounter a madman (Alice Cooper) who brainwashes America’s youth, and a plastic surgeon (Steve Martin) who gives rich old people new bodies. There’s also a love story between Billy and his hometown sweetheart, Strawberry Fields (Sandy Farina), and battle between the heroes and a villainous rock group (portrayed by Aerosmith).

          The whole thing climaxes with the weathervane coming to life as a super-powered messiah (played by real-life Beatles sideman Billy Preston) in a bizarre scene that completely reverses every significant dramatic event that happened previously. In a word, Sgt. Pepper’s is insane. Consider the dream sequence in which costar George Burns, then 80-ish, straps on an electric guitar to croak “Fixing a Hole.” And we haven’t even discussed the dancing robots. The Bee Gees and Frampton feel like guest stars in their own movie, since none of the quartet delivers a single line of dialogue, and even their musical performances are wildly erratic (although Frampton sings “Golden Slumbers” nicely). Therefore, the only people who don’t completely embarrass themselves are Martin, who gets to be funny on purpose, and Preston, whose natural funk somehow elevates him above the ludicrous surroundings.

Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band: FREAKY

Saturday Night Fever (1977)

          Saturday Night Fever is more than just the movie with John Travolta wearing a white suit and dancing to the music of the Bee Gees. It’s also an insightful study of ambition and desperation, and a gritty depiction of life in the working-class neighborhoods of New York City. So while the storyline is melodramatic and some of the musical sequences go on too long, Travolta’s performance is one of the most iconic acting turns of the ’70s, and the movie is filled with moments that have become ingrained into the texture of cinema history. Norman Wexler adapted the script from a New York magazine article titled “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,” which, ironically, author Nik Cohn later admitted he fabricated, so it’s not as if Saturday Night Fever has any claim to factual accuracy; what the movie offers instead is a palpable sense that its relatable characters are obsessed with scoring on the dancefloor as a means of escaping what they perceive as the suffocating confines of “normal” life.

          Travolta stars as Tony Manero, a twentysomething paint-store drone whose life is headed straight to blue-collar mediocrity except for when he unleashes his prodigious talent for disco dancing. On the multicolored floor of the Odyssey nightclub, he’s a god. Tony’s abilities draw him into a fractious relationship with an ambitious female counterpart, Stephanie (Karen Lynn Gorney), and he’s fascinated by the fact that she’s even better at putting on big-city airs than he is, so he studies with her to improve his dance technique, to polish his faux refinement, and to make time with her in order to prove his Neanderthal manhood. Watching dim-bulb Tony realize that there’s more to life than pretending to be a big shot is compelling, and the subplot depicting Tony’s abusive treatment of a simple neighborhood girl (Donna Pescow) adds dark colors to the characterization. The sequences depicting Tony and his buddies prowling for women are especially vivid, with the streetwise dudes spewing foul-mouthed boasts and indulging impulses so primal that they’re forever walking the line between big talk and big, violent action.

           Travolta gives his career-best performance, matching youthful swagger with genuine pathos, and he’s credible even when the movie gets overwrought. However it’s the dance scenes that make the film legendary, and for the most part they don’t disappoint; director John Badham’s exciting visual contributions include the up-and-down camera moves that follow Travolta’s every gyration during his show-stopping routine set to “You Should Be Dancing.” For the whole Saturday Night Fever experience, by the way, avoid the truncated PG-rated version that Paramount released in 1978 so younger viewers could see the movie, because only the R-rated original has the full impact.

Saturday Night Fever: RIGHT ON