SGT PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND: we know you won't enjoy this show

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 20^th 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.

GOING IN STYLE: grandpa's last gasp

George Burns' career revival in the mid 1970s was one of the showbiz wonders of the decade. The stars of 30s movies and 40s radio made a surprise smash hit comeback in 1975 with 'The Sunshine Boys' and followed up with 'Oh God,' 'Just You and Me Kid' and 'Oh God Book II' (I'm glossing discreetly over 'Sergeant Pepper's :Lonely Hearts Club Band' - every octogenarian's allowed one career stumble).We have to reach back to the early 1930s and George Arliss run of movies for Warner Bros to find anyone as old as Burns headlining so many mainstream Hollywood productions.

By 1979 Warner Brothers were so confident of 83 year old Burns' star power that when they came to make GOING IN STYLE they not only put his name above the title (and allowed him to act without his toupee) but also cast 78 year old Lee Strasberg and the prematurely old looking Art Carney alongside him as co-stars. Then they filled the supporting cast with not a single recognisable face or name. These three old guys were going to carry the whole movie with no concessions to the expectations of multiplex-goers under 50.
It was a daring move and one that doesn't quite pay off.
GOING IN STYLE shuffles along with all the speed of the old codgers at the heart of its story, making a last gasp effort to prove it's still young at heart. The action's sprightly at first with a certain spring in its step and an obvious sense of determination, but all too soon it runs out of breath, enthusiasm and energy. And then comes the overwhelming urge for pudding and a nap....
Joe (Burns), Al (Carney) and Willie (Strasberg) are three elderly housemates, living out their declining years aimlessly, going to the park everyday to feed the pigeons and wait for the Grim Reaper to tap them on the shoulder. Joe finally summons up the energy to declare he's had enough of this and challenge Al and Willie to join him in robbing a Manhattan bank just for the hell of it.
So far so good.
Then comes act three, and it's soon clear that writer-director Martin Brest has absolutely no idea what to do with his characters after they've pulled off the raid. In place of meaningful forward motion he treats us to a painfully extended sequence in a Las Vegas casino watching Joe and Al playing craps. It just goes on and on without any real purpose. They're clearly having fun but it's definitely a case of "you'd had to be there" and ideally be one of them.
If Brest's intention was for the story's pace mimic the rather more sedate rhythms of senior citizen life then he succeeds admirably, but it comes at a price. The final product is considerably less than satisfying or memorable. Burns is good but he's not great and he's not enough to rescue the film from its own failings.

THE SUNSHINE BOYS: one last chance to get right back up there!

There's something about New York Jewish humour that gets me every time. I love the phrasing, the intonation and the delivery. And let's not forget the subject matter. From the fretting over the small stuff to the existential angst there's always something to obsess over or complain about.
Woody Allen and Jackie Mason are past masters of the art, and so are vaudeville veterans Willy Clark and Al Lewis.

You've never heard of Lewis and Clark? For forty three years they were The Sunshine Boys, treading the boards at theatres across the United States and becoming an important part of vaudeville history in the process.
They live on in the mid 70s as relics of an extinct art form; Lewis in comfortable retirement in the spare room at his daughter's house in suburban New Jersey, while Clark labors on, schlepping across Manhattan from one futile tv commercial audition to the next and refusing to accept that his time as an entertainer is up.
Then Clark's agent and nephew Ben (Richard Benjamin) lands them one last payday, recreating their famous 'Doctor sketch' for a big budget tv salute to America's entertainment heritage. The only problem is Lewis and Clark haven't spoken to each other in eleven years. Clark has never forgiven his partner for retiring when he wanted to continue with the act.
In the hands of Walter Matthau and a Best Supporting Actor Oscar winning George Burns and with an electrifying screenplay by Neil Simon THE SUNSHINE BOYS is comedy gold. 
Matthau as the cantankerous, resentful Clark is all sound and fury while Burns' Al Lewis is an oasis of absent-minded calm. But he's no pushover which only raises Clark's blood pressure further driving him into rages not befitting a senior citizen.
Despite the bad temper and the festering, decades-long resentment THE SUNSHINE BOYS really is a feel good movie. There is so much to enjoy in the performances of all three main characters and Simon's sparkling script that you're guaranteed to be left with a big smile on your face and a sense of having been thoroughly entertained.