The Rutles: All You Need is Cash (1978)

Posted on June 20, 2012 at 6:00 am by Jeff Kuykendall

Monty Python’s Flying Circus ended its run in 1974 with something of a whimper: John Cleese had left the show by its final season, the title had been shortened to just Monty Python, and despite some moments of inspiration, the Flying Circus seemed to have met with a rough landing. Nonetheless, the release of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) was on the horizon, and the individual Pythons were already moving on to some of their best solo work, notably Cleese’s Fawlty Towers. Eric Idle was one of the first out of the gate with Rutland Weekend Television, a Pythonesque sketch comedy series which can now be seen as a forerunner to SCTV. The program, which ran for two seasons and a Christmas special through 1975-76, has never been released on DVD, but spawned one of Idle’s best-loved creations, The Rutles. The fictional band, a send-up of the Beatles, were the invention of Idle and series co-star Neil Innes. Innes was a member of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, who had appeared in Magical Mystery Tour. He was also a longtime friend of Idle’s, the Bonzos having been the house band for the proto-Python series Do Not Adjust Your Set in 1968 with Idle as well as Terry Jones, Michael Palin, and Terry Gilliam; eventually he began appearing on Monty Python and touring with the group (he can be heard on the live albums, and seen performing in the concert film Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl). Most famously, he played the doomed minstrel in Holy Grail. The Rutles were at first little more than a short film parodying A Hard Day’s Night; they were included in the tie-in The Rutland Dirty Weekend Book, and the song from the short film, “I Must Be in Love,” was included on the LP The Rutland Weekend Songbook. When Idle was asked to guest host Saturday Night Live – seen by many as the heir apparent to Monty Python – he brought along the Rutles film to help fill out the program. He told Kim Howard Johnson in Life Before and After Monty Python, “I had the idea to do it as a show for TV in England, and Lorne Michaels said ‘Hang on, I’ve got a larger budget at NBC – why don’t you do it for NBC, and you’ll get more money to spend?’ It seemed like a wise idea at the time…”

Fake advertisement for The Rutles from "The Rutland Dirty Weekend Book" (1976).

It was indeed a wise idea, for The Rutles: All You Need is Cash (1978) is now widely regarded as the best of the Beatles parodies, and the fake band has garnered a cult following of its own, to rival that of Spinal Tap. This television special (feature length: 73 minutes without commercials) takes as its scope the entirety of the Beatles’ career, each phase parodied with a geeky specificity. Although it’s not necessary to know anything about the Fab Four to appreciate the irreverent humor – Idle is also sending up pretentious documentaries – it probably doesn’t seem like a very remarkable film unless you’re up on your Beatles lore. That’s the thing: there are enough Beatlemaniacs in the world to justify pushing the gags into the obscure, like a reenactment of Cynthia Lennon being left at the train station while the Beatles headed off to Bangor for a Transcendental Meditation conference, or recreating the photos of Astrid Kirchherr while narrator Idle talks of the forgotten fifth Rutle, “Leppo.” Part of this exactness was the result of Idle and Innes having watched a rough cut of The Long and Winding Road, what was supposed to be the “official” Beatles documentary, but was never actually completed and released. (The project would eventually become The Beatles Anthology.) But of course there had already been countless books and articles published about the band, and the minutiae of their history was canonical to pop culture. The Rutles took that as a given, and included in its running time parodies of Beatles album covers, films, public scandals (including John’s “bigger than Jesus” remark, and Paul’s admission of taking LSD), and, of course, the songs themselves.

"Piggy in the Middle," part of the Rutles film "Tragical History Tour": "They say revolution's in the air/I'm dancing in my underwear/and I don't care."

Twenty original songs were composed for the film by Innes and performed with Ollie Halsall, Rikki Fataar, John Halsey, Andy Brown, and John Altman, covering the scope of Beatles styles from the early Hamburg years to their Let it Be rooftop performance. The soundtrack – released as an LP, and later an expanded CD – is so solid a rock album that Innes recorded a follow-up, Archaeology, in 1996. Innes’ vocals are uncannily like Lennon’s, to the extent that the Rutles song “Cheese and Onions” was once included on a Beatles bootleg in error. He plays the Lennon role of Ron Nasty in the film, mimicking his subject – irreverent, aloof – almost clinically. Idle is Dirk McQuickly; during a Royal Command Performance he captures Paul’s mooney-eyed gaze while singing the love ballad “With a Girl Like You” and locking eyes with a bored Queen. Musicians Halsey and Fataar play Barry Wom (Ringo) and Stig O’Hara (George), respectively, and Harrison was probably pleased to see he was being played by an Indian. Harrison – a Python fan who had appeared on Rutland Weekend Television, and would produce Life of Brian (1979) – cameos in the film as an interviewer questioning a Derek Taylor-like Michael Palin about the finances of Rutle Corps. It’s suggested that a company which gives away money for free might not be a good idea; while Palin carefully words his answers, looters run riot in the background.

George Harrison's cameo, with Michael Palin, outside the offices of "Rutle Corps."

Also here: Paul Simon, Ronnie Wood, Bianca Jagger (as Dirk’s wife Martini, “a French actress who spoke no English and precious little French”), and an impish Mick Jagger, who seems to relish taking shots at the Beatles through the thin veil of the Rutles: “About twenty minutes and that was it, off, helicopter, back to the Warwick Hotel, two birds each.” With Lorne Michaels producing and Gary Weis co-directing with Idle (Weis had made short films for SNL), a large segment of the SNL cast contributes to the film, including John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Al Franken, Tom Davis, and Bill Murray as “Bill Murray the ‘K.'” This SNL/Monty Python blend proves irresistible, the Pythonesque conceptual gags (Idle’s host is constantly vexed by the camera, which creeps away from him, transports him to the wrong locations, and even runs him over) mixing well with some 70’s late-night-TV edginess (Idle to Aykroyd: “What’s it like to be such an asshole?”). And it has to be said that Idle fearlessly approaches some awkward subject matter, such as Brian Epstein’s closeted sexuality and accidental death. But the latter, however dark, inspires one of the film’s funniest sequences: an interview with Stig and Nasty in which they react with shock to their manager’s sudden acceptance of a teaching post in Australia. Idle and Innes slowly process the advice of their new spiritual mentor, the Surrey Mystic: “We shouldn’t be covered with grief at thoughts of Australia.” “He did say we could still keep in touch with him by tapping the table.” “And postcards.”

The "Cheese and Onions" sequence from "Yellow Submarine Sandwich."

Animators from Yellow Submarine (1968) actually worked on a short segment in The Rutles parodying the movie, which helps explain why the animation seems to move past the point of homage – it could almost be a deleted scene from the Beatles film. (Don’t miss that the song which plays over the animation, “Cheese and Onions,” has a droll musical send-up of “A Day in the Life” at the very end.) But it was the Rutles music that was accused of being too close to the source: ATV Music, then owners of the Beatles catalogue, sued Innes for 50% of the songs’ copyright – rather absurd if placed in light of the entire career of “Weird” Al Yankovic. Still, the Rutles legend endures through the two Innes-led albums and a sequel created by Idle, The Rutles 2: Can’t Buy Me Lunch (2005, compiled using outtakes from the original); but most of all through the enduring popularity of All You Need is Cash. Now, just as Python was often considered to continue the spirit of the Beatles, the Rutles seem to co-exist with the Beatles like the flip side of a coin. As Harrison wrote in his autobiography, I Me Mine, “The Rutles told the story so much better than the usual boring documentary. Try and see that film. That is a recommendation rather like saying: ‘Don’t bother me – see my lawyer. He will explain everything.'”

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Yellow Submarine (1968)

Posted on June 18, 2012 at 6:00 am by Jeff Kuykendall

Now we can look back and see that Yellow Submarine (1968) is as much an iconic work of 1960’s pop art as Andy Warhol’s soup cans. (Not that it can be so easily categorized; not that there’s been anything else like it before or since.) But it was something of a rush job. The film was intended to fulfill the Beatles’ three-picture deal with United Artists, following the phenomenal successes of A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965), pictures which helped prove that the band wasn’t just a passing (fab) fad. 1966 passed with no Beatles movie, and the exhausted band retired from touring by the end of the summer, focusing instead on their increasingly ambitious albums. In 1967, rather than handing their identities over to the comic inventions of Richard Lester, the band directed themselves in the television special Magical Mystery Tour – their first critical failure (for the film, at least; the songs, as usual, were fantastic). Increasingly fractured as a band, and distracted by the meditation techniques of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in Rishikesh, they were only connected by a thin thread to their third United Artists film, which was produced by Al Brodax, responsible for their 1965-1967 animated series, The Beatles. The band consented to hand over a mere four exclusive songs for the film – a far cry from the complete original albums which they created for the Lester pictures. Clearly the Beatles, who disliked the TV series, didn’t prioritize the film version very highly; John and Paul each wrote one song, and George, taking the rare advantage, wrote two. They wouldn’t even voice their own characters, only appearing in a token live action cameo at the film’s end. But Brodax and director George Dunning (who also worked on the TV series) had greater ambitions for the film: Yellow Submarine would adapt its form and style to the psychedelic spirit of Revolver and Sgt. Pepper. Over the course of eleven months, an army of animators and artists, many of them young students laboriously coloring each individual cel, would produce a film worthy of the Beatles legacy.

George (Peter Batten), Ringo (Paul Angelis), John (John Clive), and Paul (Geoffrey Hughes) disguise themselves as Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Luckily, Brodax and Dunning were given permission to dip beyond those four original contributions and go deep into the Beatles’ classic 1965-67 catalog, creating a musical that picks up their discography where Help! left off. (The original soundtrack album featured the title track and the new songs on the A-side, with excerpts from music producer George Martin’s score on the B-side. The 1999 Yellow Submarine Songtrack excises the instrumentals and features all of the film’s songs.) So along with the new material you get animated versions of “All You Need is Love,” “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” “Eleanor Rigby,” “Nowhere Man,” “When I’m 64,” “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” and more, many of them just as much stepping stones in the evolution of the music video as the experimental promotional films which the band had begun to make for television a few years earlier (“Rain,” “Strawberry Fields Forever,” etc.). One of the reasons the film has endured so well over the decades is the timeless quality of the music; the story, too, is fairytale enough to keep the film from feeling dated, even if the eye-popping visual style embodies the 1960’s. Heinz Edelmann, a freelance commercial artist from Germany, redesigned the Beatles to fit the psychedelic age, pulling them away from the Disney-esque cartoonishness of the TV series toward a character design that violated more than a few rules of animation. The Yellow Submarine Beatles are less flexible but more visually arresting. The characters have a deliberate two-dimensionality, like moving paintings, with pale faces, tiny eyes, long legs thickening into bell-bottoms, and vertical lines that smoothly curve at the edges, transforming the Fab Four into monoliths.

"Only a Northern Song," a sardonic George Harrison quickie transformed by the animators into psychedelic splendor.

They occupy a landscape that ignores more laws of animation: the world of Yellow Submarine has no consistency or logic in terms of style, spatial relationships, or physics, an intentional decision to keep the film visually intriguing from one sequence to the next. It’s like 90 minutes of a concert poster at the Fillmore come to kaleidoscopic life. Liverpool is represented as a collage of Xeroxed photographs (as an in-joke, many of the faces are members of the crew), dressed in drab colors to match the sadness of “Eleanor Rigby” while the bright-yellow submarine drifts through the sky. The Beatles’ home is a vast mansion of endless halls and hundreds of doors, each of which reveals another dimension (an oncoming train or a scene from King Kong), or spits forth a randomly appropriated pop art object: winking glasses, a skull and crossbones, an umbrella, a bowler hat. Once John (John Clive), Paul (Geoffrey Hughes), George (Peter Batten), and Ringo (Paul Angelis) board the Yellow Submarine on a voyage to save Pepperland from the Blue Meanies, the film embarks on a real head trip (signaled by the orgasmic orchestral build from the end of “A Day in the Life,” and a rapid-fire series of photographs of soaring over the English countryside). The Sea of Monsters lets the animators’ imagination cut loose with many bizarre creations, most notably a vacuum cleaner beastie that sucks up the entire film, leaving the submarine trapped in a white void, like something out of the classic Chuck Jones short “Duck Amuck.” The Foothills of the Headlands is a series of heads bisected so we can read their thoughts (“Freud,” “De Sade,” “E=MC²”). The Sea of Holes is perhaps the most memorable of these surreal landscapes, two planes of perfectly aligned black elliptical dots stretching into the distance, which Dunning pans across to dizzying effect. By comparison, Pepperland seems more conventional, but it does provide an Edelmann playground for the most directly symbolic visual scheme of the film, with the Blue Meanies systematically draining the land of any other color, and transforming the Pepperlanders into black-and-white statues.

Lobby card for "Yellow Submarine" depicting one of the Blue Meanies, a Snapping Turk.

All of this would be for naught if the script didn’t capture the wit and joy of the Lester films; the truth is that you don’t really miss the authentic voices of the Beatles, for their doppelgangers are just droll enough to sell every silly joke. (The script is the work of Lee Minoff, Brodax, Jack Mendelsohn, and Love Story author Erich Segal. John Lennon later made the claim that he also contributed ideas.) It’s now difficult to imagine the canon of the Beatles without key moments from Yellow Submarine, such as the wonderful “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” sequence – pushing the art of rotoscoping to imaginative ends via bright, sloppy splashes of paint – or the Chief Blue Meanie (Angelis again) overcome by the truth that All You Need is Love, his puffy blue body sprouting flowers. A 1999 marketing blitz reintroduced the film to a new generation via a (non-anamorphic) DVD and a brief theatrical re-release, along with toys and other assorted merchandise. Thirteen years later, the Blu-Ray has finally arrived, and it’s a significant visual and aural upgrade (you can be a purist and choose the original mono soundtrack – available as an option on the disc – but the 5.1 remix of the Beatles music is truly spectacular). It’s highly recommended. Yellow Submarine perfectly embodies the innovation and restless creativity of the band that inspired it. Surely the Beatles realized after attending the film’s premiere that outsourcing their third film wasn’t a bad idea after all.

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Caged Heat (1974)

Posted on June 15, 2012 at 6:00 am by Jeff Kuykendall

Never forget that acclaimed director Jonathan Demme’s debut was a women-in-prison film from 1974 with gratuitous nudity, bloody mayhem, and a gonzo style which indicates to the viewer that all the trashiness just might have quotation marks around it. Which is not to say that it doesn’t work on a pure exploitation level; quite the contrary. Like the films of Jack Hill (Switchblade Sisters), Russ Meyer, and Roger Corman (whose factory spawned this film), Caged Heat aims to make crowd-pleasing entertainment that gooses every thrill for all it’s worth. Erica Gavin, who made significant impressions in Meyer’s sleeper hit Vixen (1968), as well as his legendary big-studio con Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), has a rare and welcome starring role as Jacqueline Wilson, arrested at the film’s outset for assault of a police officer during a failed robbery, and sentenced to 10-40 years at a women’s penitentiary. Demme establishes the prison with a virtuoso tracking shot from one open, grimy cell to another, the women half-dressed and gambling, reading, pissing, fighting; we briefly glimpse our surrogate, Jacqueline, getting told off by her new roommate Lavelle (Cheryl “Rainbeaux” Smith, Revenge of the Cheerleaders), a young but tough-talking girl given to hallucinatory fever dreams. “Tow the line and avoid trouble like the plague,” advises the severe-looking warden (Barbara Steele, Black Sunday). “You’re in a house of desperate women here, and a long, long way from home.” We’re deep into the territory of a tawdry pulp paperback.

Barbara Steele as McQueen, the sadistic prison warden.

McQueen’s principal arm of punishment is Dr. Randolph (Warren Miller), whose experimental “psycho-surgery” is ostensibly a rehabilitation treatment, but in fact is little more than an excuse to sedate, sexually assault, and then lobotomize the female prisoners, a fact which Lavelle discovers while spying with fascination through a peephole. Jacqueline also meets Pandora (Ella Reid) and Belle (Roberta Collins, The Big Doll House), two devoted inmates who cross-dress to entertain the prisoners with some bawdy vaudeville humor that unnerves the sexually-repressed McQueen. When Pandora is sent to solitary, it’s Belle – a kleptomaniac – who sneaks through the ventilation shaft and into the prison kitchen to steal her some food. There’s also Maggie (Juanita Brown, Foxy Brown), who manages a successful escape with Jacqueline in tow. The two hit the road on a crime spree with “Crazy Alice” (Crystin Sinclaire), a down-on-her-luck gal who would gladly give up her wrestling-prostitute gig for some bank robberies. But forever loyal to their friends in lock-up, the girls decide to stage a break-in…just in time to rescue Lavelle and Belle from the cranial drill of Dr. Randolph. A car chase and a bloody showdown with the cops ensues.

Erica Gavin as Jacqueline Wilson

From its breathless opening foot chase to its closing passages of the female convicts blasting bloody holes in the cops cornering them on a dusty road, Caged Heat follows the Corman-brand formula of exploitation and strikes every chord as hard as it can. There is an evident edge of satire, but little is laugh-out-loud hilarious. Instead, Demme – directing his own script – signals the larger-than-life qualities of the material with comic book swipes between scenes, plot points just tawdry enough to crack a smile, and a few overtly-stylized sequences, such as absurdly lurid dreams and an opening court sentencing with Gavin facing the camera – and the booming voice of the unseen judge – while standing in a black void. At the same time, he makes you care about these women. It’s the damnedest thing. He moves just enough in the direction of three-dimensional characterization that you’ll be forgiven if you don’t notice that those elements, too, are clichés happily imported from a hundred crime films gone before. The reason is that the clichés work, and Demme knows it. It’s a women-in-prison movie; you’re bound to sympathize when they’re tortured, abused, and locked naked in solitary. You’re bound to root for them when they finally get a chance to bust loose, when a hand finds purchase on a weapon. And it’s in those moments that Demme pushes his exploitation movie for all it’s worth. Spoilers: these women get their revenge.

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