How did it happen?
How did one of the most revered albums in
the history of popular music get turned into quite possibly the worst film
musical ever made?
I know it happened because I’m holding the
dvd disc in my hand but I’m still finding it hard to believe the true awfulness
of what I’ve just witnessed.
It’s not actually necessary to watch SGT
PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND to recognise what a truly bad idea it is. Just
take a look at the ingredients.
1. The most mismatched cast in the history
of Hollywood.
Who thought that pairing The Bee Gees with Peter Frampton, George Burns, Alice
Cooper and Steve Martin would create on-screen chemistry?
2. A
selection of classic songs so closely identified with their originators that
the aforementioned mismatched cast haven’t got a hope of sounding like anything other than a karaoke cover
band.
3. A plotline that has to fit the storyline
of this bunch of songs which have little or no connection to one another.
4. A title taken from the Beatles famous
album for a film that uses songs which are not actually on the album, negating the point of
tying the film to the album.
Mix everything together, shake vigorously
until it resembles a luridly-coloured mess and then hurl everything at a blank screen and hope like heck that it looks like something vaguely appealing.
The only sensible decision in the whole
project was to leave all the dialogue to George Burns.
After all he’d been talking since the turn
of the 20th century and by 1978 was an old hand at it, whereas
Frampton and the Brothers Gibb are stretched to the limits of their acting
ability just reacting wordlessly to the action around them.
Frampton won the part of romantic lead
Billy Shears by dint of his success with the 1976 LP “Frampton Comes Alive”
which at the time was the biggest selling live album ever.
But what his chart success didn’t reveal
but the film did was that he ran like a girl and had the charisma of an
unpainted floorboard. On screen he made Shaun Cassidy look tough.
The Bee Gees had been enjoying similar
chart success with “Saturday Night Fever” which was on its way to becoming the
best selling soundtrack album of all time.
According to the prevailing logic it was
this track record of writing and recording a string of disco hits in their distinctive
falsetto singing style which made them obvious candidates to interpret the music
of The Beatles.
The only musical act to emerge from the
wreckage of this fiasco relatively unscathed are Earth Wind and Fire who
succeeded in making “Got to get you into my life” their own by not trying to
sing it like The Beatles.
Other bizarre casting decisions include
veteran British comedian Frankie Howerd as the villain, Mean Mr Mustard. Well
known in his homeland for his leering double entendres he would have meant
nothing to American audiences even if he had been allowed to do his thing,
which he wasn’t.
The film does no one any favours. Neither Frampton nor The Bee Gees have ever
starred again in an acting role on screen, director Michael Schultz has spent
the bulk of his subsequent career directing tv shows, and leading lady Sandy
Farina (who made her debut in SGT PEPPER) never made another film.
There’s not even the consolation of kitsch
appeal. The film plays it too straight for that, so why watch it?
For me the appeal is in witnessing how so
many talented and successful individuals could get it so badly wrong and create
this multi-million dollar train wreck. I found myself compelled to keep
watching because I wanted to find out how much worse it could get.
It’s a perverse pleasure and certainly not
one I recommend paying money for, but if you can borrow a copy it’s definitely
worth a look.
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