![]() ![]() "All Together Now", a cheerful march, one of the easiest songs to sing-along to in their career "Eleanor Rigby", one of the most concise & haunting descriptions of misery ever put to music "Yellow Submarine", a goofy, sweet bit of warmhearted juvenilia, with one of Ringo's warmest vocals Forgive me for being redundant, but how can anyone say a word against this playlist? And since Yellow Submarine, like the movie version of Magical Mystery Tour before it, consists of very little beside psychedelic interstitials connecting what amount to early music videos all in row, it is really a good thing that its songs are so fine: arguably the finest collection of songs ever used as the backbone for a motion picture - that is to say, I would make the argument. They are every bit as remarkable as everything else this most incredible of rock groups was churning out in the immensely revolutionary period begun with Rubber Soul and concluded by the "Hey Jude" single. Really, though, there's not a blessed thing wrong with "All Together Now", "Only a Northern Song", "Hey Bulldog", or "It's All Too Much" they fit in perfectly comfortable with their mates on the soundtrack (that is, the film's soundtrack - the official soundtrack album contains those four along with only "Yellow Submarine" and "All You Need Is Love", with seven poky instrumentals composed by music producer extraordinaire George Martin). * Seven songs from the 1965-'67 period showed up on the soundtrack, along with four "new" numbers, though it is a clear sign of how little investment the actual Beatles had in the project that these four tracks were basically cast-offs, songs the band had recorded and decided weren't good enough for commercial release during the sessions that (if I am not mistaken) led to the Magical Mystery Tour EP and the singles such as "Penny Lane"/"Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Lady Madonna" released in the aftermath of that EP, but before the daunting, monolithic sessions for The Beatles, which history has come to know as The White Album. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band from 1978, and Julie Taymor's 2007 Across the Universe, which may or may not be a brilliant, beautiful experiment, depending on your perspective. The other such films taken from the Beatles are the villainous Sgt. ![]() Inspired - damn loosely - by the song from 1966's Revolver album, the film is the first of the three jukebox musicals based upon the Beatles' work, and the only one of those to use the Beatles' original recordings (a note on terminology, for those unfamiliar with the phrase: a "jukebox musical" yokes pre-existing pop songs to an original plot. This is as it should be: for Yellow Submarine is a marvel altogether. ![]() This ended up being entirely unsatisfactory to UA (which is altogether fair), and the third film in the deal finally came out in 1970 but meanwhile, we are still in 1968, when the fourth feature to star the Beatles as characters, if not as actors, was released to great acclaim both artistic and financial, a watershed moment in the aesthetics of psychedelia done up cinematically a film that even the Beatles themselves, battle-scarred and doubtlessly quite sick of movies altogether, thought was pretty much great. The possibility cropped up that their third feature could be an animated film, which was pleasing to the band then the possibility further cropped up that they didn't even have to provide the voices, but just poke their heads in for a one-shot cameo at the very end. So a third film was a rather disagreeable necessity (the self-produced Magical Mystery Tour didn't count, remember). But there was a single problem: they had signed a three-picture deal with United Artists. After Magical Mystery Tour imploded with critics and fans, the Beatles were mightily disinclined to make another feature film for had not the shooting of Help! been a massive nightmare for all involved? and now their labor of love had been widely, even universally derided as an indulgent, impossible mess. ![]()
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