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The
Beatles and Film From Youth Culture to Counterculture
Stephen Glynn
Cinema and Youth Cultures Series Abingdon: Routledge Focus, 2021 Hardback. 115 p. ISBN 978-0367225278. £47
Reviewed
by Claude Chastagner Université
Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3
One more book on the Beatles? Yes indeed, one more on
an already very long list. This one, however, stands out for its concise,
exclusive focus on the five movies connected to the band. It is on all accounts
a modest book, but it is precisely this modesty that gives its relevance.
Following a simple chronological order, it devotes one chapter to each of the
movies the Beatles featured in, with the exception of Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow
Submarine, lumped together in the third one. The presentation is quite
plain, with just a handful of black-and-white photographs, all meant to sustain
the author’s demonstration. The language and the tone, above all, shun any kind
of useless jargon or vain virtuosity. Rather, the author painstakingly develops
the historical and social background of the movies, summarises their plots,
sheds light on the shootings themselves, and eventually puts forward simple,
but always relevant hypotheses as to their artistic and social significance. Numerous
contemporary and recent data (reviews, figures, etc.) are put to excellent use, allowing today’s readers to
appreciate to its full extent the impact these movies had on their audience. The strength of Glynn’s book is that it combines
an illuminating analysis of the movies per
se, based on the most recent tools of film and music studies, with a
sociological insight of the era, providing a new angle from which to consider
western youth culture. Glynn himself defines his focus as being “on the Beatles’
film work as an attitudinal indicator of youth socio-cultural movements” [2]. In this respect, the Beatles’ movies clearly increasingly address the
“youth” audience, and not just the “teenage” market of most musical movies
pre-dating theirs. As the subtitle of the book implies, the author’s position
is that the movies featuring the Beatles went from being at the heart of, or
even shaping, the newly born, teen-led, and seemingly carefree youth culture of
the early Sixties to defining the more socially committed central tenets of the
late Sixties counterculture. His argument is that even if some of the Beatles’
movies do not stand out as being revolutionary or even groundbreaking, they
nevertheless “reveal a fixation […] on attitudinal and personal development” [3]
which gives them an unusual power. The first chapter deals with A Hard Day’s Night (1964), both a critical and commercial success, which
astutely celebrates the joyful mood of the new generation and the passing of
the previous, while at the same time hinting at the darker sides of this take-over:
the merciless quest for happiness through mercantile pursuits, and the
insidious attacks on individual freedom. Help! is given a shorter
chapter, partly due, we assume, to its slightly less favourable welcome (though
its commercial success was even more resounding than its predecessor). Stephen
Glynn nevertheless stresses the musical maturation of the Beatles, evidenced by
the soundtrack, and how the movie can be read as a metaphor, or an allegory, of
the band’s cautious retreat from the limelight and its gradual awareness of the
limits of fame. The third chapter sees the Beatles taking a more active, though
highly criticised, role in the making of their next movie, the party improvised
Magical Mystery Tour shown
(most unfortunately in black-and-white) on British television in 1967, which
the author aptly describes as the “grafting of an LA hippie commune onto
Lancashire holiday customs” [59]. The fourth movie is the Yellow Submarine cartoon (1968), a project the Beatles
initially disapproved of, until they finally endorsed it and accepted to appear
in the last sequence on the strength of the excerpts they had been shown. If Yellow
Submarine describes the four
musicians as the powerful and dynamic leaders of the hippie
counterculture, their last movie, Let It Be (1970), shot mostly inside recording
studios (but for the famous last scene, the last concert of the Beatles, on the
rooftop of the Apple building) conveys a different image, one of doubt,
introspection and isolation, a prefiguration of the band’s final, and bitter,
implosion. Thus, according to the author, taken together, the Beatles’ movies
“advocate then retreat from first youth culture, then counterculture, and
finally reject the entire cultural construct known as ‘Beatles’” [4]. Among a wealth of revealing passages,
particularly interesting are the analysis of the numerous borrowings from pop
art in Yellow Submarine or
Bond’s movies in Help! or the transition the author establishes between the
importance of cinema theatres as concert venues for the Beatles and many other
pop bands of the era, to their presence on the screen, a move “indicative of
the growing synergistic rapport within the British and increasingly global
entertainment industries” [10]. Indeed, if A Hard Day’s Night is a British film, in the sense that it used
British cast, crew, and locations, it was financed by the American company
United Artists, to which all the profits went, establishing in the process “a
funding pattern for the rest of the decade” [17]. Glynn’s book also abounds
with very original micro-analyses of specific scenes: Harrison trying various shirts
on in A Hard Day’s Night, or
the “girl-power” ending of the same movie, counterbalanced by Help!’s “reactionary depiction of race
and gender” [38]. The Beatles and Film : From Youth Culture to
Counterculture is thus far from
being a book reserved to the die-hard fans and on the contrary can be seen as a
brief but accurate tribute to the youth culture and hippiedom of the Sixties
from an unusual, and most relevant angle. Stephen Glynn, The Beatles
and Film : From Youth Culture to Counterculture (Abingdon: Routledge
Focus, 2021)—Reviewed by Claude
Chastagner, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3
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