A Guide to The Beatles on Film, From 'Help!' to Macca Making Mashed Potatoes

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An absolute belter. What started as a cheap cash-in on Beatlemania – that’s why it’s in black and white – turned into a new wave classic, thanks to Alun Owen’s super-Scouse script and Lester’s anarchic direction, occasionally lifted wholesale from The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film. It’s 48 frantic hours on the coattails of the band as they get into scrapes and generally make being a Beatle look like the most fun anyone could ever have.

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The slack, Bond-spoofing follow-up, which was essentially a massive jolly – the band suggested locations for the script which they fancied going on holiday to, and spent all their time in Austria, the Bahamas and elsewhere getting extremely blazed. The quite yikes-y plot involves Starr being stolen by a cannibal cult, though the fun’s a lot more forced than in A Hard Day’s Night. That said, the bit where the four lads open the respective doors of their terraced houses, before we see that they all actually live together in one massive house, is the best gag in either film.

Filming of this big colourful Christmas film for the BBC began just two weeks after the death of manager Brian Epstein. You can tell too. It’s a film made by a band who knew they could do anything they wanted, but had no idea what that actually was anymore: a series of sketches, dream sequences, song and dance numbers and miscellaneous pratting about, all loosely tied together by the idea of a coach trip. McCartney’s plan for directing – just a circle drawn on a piece of paper, chopped up into segments with little drawings in – didn’t catch on. It did, however, revolutionise pop promos and point towards the ‘visual album’. Beyoncé, Janelle Monae, Frank Ocean and more would join in later.

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The Beatles’ other great cinema triumph, though they had little to do with it. It’s an animated jukebox musical, picking bits and pieces from Revolver, Sergeant Pepper and a few singles – as well as four new songs – which is about as psychedelically nightmarish as a children’s film could conceivably be. It’s now seen as a landmark in animation, with The Beatles’ heft helping push it as a legit art form rather than disposable kid stuff.

Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s fly-on-the-wall doc charting the making of the Let It Be album has a reputation as the chronicle of a band breaking up, but that might be giving it too much credit. It looks grotty, the sound quality’s shonky, and aside from the rooftop gig, it’s a bit dull. When Lennon and Ono went to see it in an empty San Francisco theatre with Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner, they apparently burst into tears.

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After the break-up in 1970, there was a lively trade in the kind of Beatles-adjacent content you might order off Wish: the Beatlemania stage show, the deeply odd stock footage mash-up All This and World War Two, Willy Russell’s John, Paul, George, Ringo... and Bert. Then there was this: a truly mind-boggling musical in which the Bee Gees save Heartland, USA, from ruin with a little help from their friends. Watching Steve Martin giving it the Busby Berkeley to Maxwell’s Silver Hammer is quite something.

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Bobs Zemeckis and Gale – who would jump even further back to another pop era together with Back to the Future – put together this peppy teen romp which follows four friends as they try to break into the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, produced by Steven Spielberg. Frothy and joyous.

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This very funny spoof of the band's story works thanks to its authenticity – from the Hamburg days to people nicking stuff from the Apple Boutique, it all looks and feels lovingly done. That’s not an accident either. Harrison found the idea very funny, and let writer Eric Idle see an unfinished authorised Beatles doc, The Long and Winding Road, to take notes. The songs are spot on too, so much so that Noel Gallagher ripped one off.

None of the Beatles had a good Eighties, and this Macca vehicle – which he wrote, starred in, produced and wrote a soundtrack album for – is the nadir. He loses some studio tapes and has to get them back before midnight. Somehow, it lasts nearly two hours. Quite why is never made clear, and a solid 60 percent of the run time is filled with completely irrelevant dream sequences. ‘No More Lonely Nights’ bangs though.

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Arriving just at the mid-Nineties Beatle boom, Backbeat managed to drag Beatles biopics back towards respectability. It’s fairly free and easy with the facts, but it gets a lot of things right. It’s set in 1960, in the spit-und-sawdust Hamburg clubs, and captures their early, punky energy.

This is the deepest heartland of Macca-dom: domesticity, incorrigible cheeriness, and completely refusal to be embarrassed. It’s almost an art film. Like the man says: how exciting is this on the internet.

The very worst of said absolutely shocking films is the extremely wig-centric made-for-Canadian-TV stinker. Highlights include a Lennon so fake-beardy he looks like Hagrid launching a rock through McCartney’s window and shrieking, “Who the hell do you think you are!!” The beard’s so big it comes out all muffled, which sums the whole thing up. Much better is longtime Beatles collaborator Lindsay-Hogg’s Two of Us, a fictionalised account of Lennon and McCartney hanging out in mid-Seventies New York.

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The best of the recent biopics is Sam Taylor-Wood’s coming-of-age Lennon yarn focusing on the complicated triangle between him, his Aunt Mimi who raised him, and his mother Julia. Aaron Johnson’s teen Lennon can get a bit shurrup-Mimi-yer-not-even-me-real-mam, and he looks at least 20 years older than Thomas Brody Sangster’s McCartney, but there’s a potent mix of vulnerability and anger bubbling away in his performance.

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It’s everything that Beatles fans have always wanted: a seat in the room while the band knock together songs. Lindsay-Hogg’s decidedly cruddy footage from 1969 has been buffed up to a HD sheen with the same tech which Jackson used on his First World War film They Shall Not Go Old. But the most magical part is that this bleak, miserable time in the story has been recast as a time of brotherhood and joy.