br>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night at 9 I ran a YouTube post of the 1984 movie Give My Regards to Broad Street, a really peculiar movie produced, written by and starring Paul McCartney. Blessedly, he did not try to direct the thing himself – he left that task to someone named Peter Webb (whose only other directorial credits on imdb.com are TV episodes and short films) – but when the film came out it got savaged by the reviewers and died a quick death at the box office. It’s actually one of those oddball movies that’s a good deal better than its reputation. Yes, it’s quite obviously a vanity project by someone with more money than taste,but also its very klutziness gives the film a quirky charm. Apparently Paul first thought of the idea for the film while he was stuck in a London traffic jam, because the first thing we see in it is Paul McCartney stuck in a London traffic jam. The plot,to the extent the film has one, is that Paul McCartney has just finished the recording and mixing of his newest album. He sends a staff member named Harry (Ian Matthews) with the master tape to the record factory for cutting and pressing the finished records – only Harry never arrives at the factory. Apparently Harry has not only a wife (whom we never meet) but also a semi-serious girlfriend, Sandra (Tracey Ullman), and it’s Sandra who relays the news to Paul and his close friend and business associate Steve (Bryan Brown) that the all-important tapes for his new album have “gone missing.” (Later, in his search for the tapes, Paul goes to see Harry’s father, Jim, who’s played by Sir Ralph Richardson in the sort of luxury casting you can indulge in if you’re Paul McCartney.)
The movie after that is a series of chase scenes as Paul, Steve and the others in Paul’s organization mount a series of surprisingly desultory searches for the tape, and interspersed between these sequences are some marvelous music videos of Paul McCartney performing some of his greatest songs, from both the Beatles catalog and his solo years. My husband Charles came home at the tail end of the movie and together we watched a making-of documentary by Elliot Roberts, who clearly liked the film a lot less than I did. His mini-doc did have at least one piece of information that shed some light on an especially quirky aspect of the film: the presence of one of the other former Beatles in the cast. The Beatle who appeared alongside Paul was Ringo Starr, and his presence as the drummer in Paul’s studio band gives the film a major energy boost. In case there’s anyone out there who still believes that Ringo wasn’t that good a drummer and he stumbled into the Fab Four by accident, Give My Regards to Broad Street proves that they’re wrong. In fact, Ringo remains far and away the best drummer for Paul’s music; songs like “Wanderlust” and “Ballroom Dancing” that seemed to plod in Paul’s original studio versions (with either Paul playing drums himself via overdubbing or various session musicians and the ones he’s used in his touring band) come to vivid, exciting life with Ringo’s superb drumming behind them.
The problem Roberts mentioned is that Ringo refused to play on any song he’d earlier recorded with the Beatles, apparently because he realized he’d be damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. Either he wouldn’t play them as well as he had with the Beatles, in which case the critics would have said, “He was never that good anyway,” or he’d play them better, in which case the reaction would have been, “He was never that great with the Beatles.” Paul managed to work Ringo’s reluctance to repeat any Beatles material by using only Beatles ballads originally recorded without drums – “Yesterday,” “Eleanor Rigby,” “Here, There and Everywhere” – and by creating one of the film’s funniest sequences. Ringo is in the studio to record a medley of “Yesterday,” “Here,There and Everywhere” and Paul’s solo song “Wanderlust,” only at the last minute Paul tells Ringo to use wire brushes instead of drumsticks. Ringo spends the entire time Paul is playing “Yesterday” and “Here, There and Everywhere” in a futile search for his brushes, eventually searching through whole drawers full of various percussion instruments, and though he finds them he does so as Paul is about to break into “Wanderlust” – and Ringo grabs his drumsticks and thunders throughout the song, significantly raising the energy level. There’s also an in-joke in that throughout the film Ringo is pursuing a woman journalist and making the most blatant and unromantic passes at her imaginable – the joke is that she was played by Barbara Bach, Ringo’s wife, and they’d been together at least five years when this film was made.
In fact the film is full of in-joke references to the Beatles’ past – the whole intrigue surrounding the theft of the master tapes not only really happened to Paul (when he went to record Band on the Run in Nigeria and some locals decided to sock it to the white visitors by stealing their tapes and holding them for ransom). The fear that if the tapes don’t turn up by midnight Paul will lose control of his entire business enterprise and it will fall into the hands of greedy capitalist Mr. Rath (John Bennett) is awfully reminiscent of the business aspects of the Beatles’ breakup. In 1969 the other three Beatles outvoted Paul and brought in Allen Klein, one of the scuzziest and most evil people in the history of the music industry, as their new manager. Klein’s contract provided that he would receive a percentage of any new income he generated for the Beatles, and to take advantage of that he did a bunch of deals – including selling the music publishing rights to their songs the Beatles’ first manager, Brian Epstein, had made sure they retained – that were great for Klein and terrible for the Beatles’ long-term interests. On at least two occasions Paul and Yoko Ono, as John Lennon’s heir, tried to buy back these rights but they were outbid both times.
In fact, the character of “Mr. Rath” bothered me because he seemed to epitomize the anti-Semitic stereotype of the crooked, greedy Jew – I think Paul’s makeup people even gave John Bennett fake ears and nose to make him look more like the vicious Nazi stereotype of the creepy Jew, and we see Paul drawing a caricature of him that accentuates these features. This was ironic because Brian Epstein was Jewish and so was Paul’s wife Linda (her maiden name was “Eastman” but her father, New York attorney Lee Eastman, had originally been named Epstein), but it’s clear that Paul had some deep-seated resentments over the way he’d been screwed out of the Beatles’ publishing by a sharp New York operator who happened to be Jewish and whom the other Beatles had forced upon him. Another in-joke appears in a long 10-minute scene in which Paul’s rendition of “Eleanor Rigby” dissolves into a 19th-century style picnic that seems to go on forever, but it includes Linda McCartney taking a photo of the group with a box camera typical of the period. It’s a reference to Linda’s past as a rock photographer, in which capacity she’d begun to build up a reputation well before she and Paul started dating and got together.
In some ways, Give My Regards to Broad Street reminded me of Paul’s other foray into moviemaking, the Beatles’ 1967 TV film Magical Mystery Tour (for which Paul also wrote the script – only in that case it was called a “scrupt” and it was just a circle representing the hour-long running time with notations about approximately what would be happening at each point of the show) and he was the project’s director (to the extent there was one) as well. Like Magical Mystery Tour, Give My Regards to Broad Street is a collection of great music videos loosely connected by a sort of plotlet that we really don’t care about. But it was a welcome reunion not only between two of the former Beatles but their record producer and engineer, George Martin and Geoff Emerick, and it’s a real treat to see them back at the boards for a Paul McCartney recording project. There’s a sense of endearing amateurishness about Give My Regards to Broad Street that’s also present in Paul’s first few post-Beatles solo projects (i.e., everything he did between the breakup and Band on the Run), and I especially loved the sequence towards the end in which Paul is reduced to busking on the street, singing an uptempo version of “Yesterday,” and apparently Paul really did busk for the scene and people, obviously not recognizing him, threw money in his hat. Obviously this is supposed to represent what Paul’s character fears will happen to him if the album tapes aren’t found by midnight and he’s financially ruined. Give My Regards to Broad Street is hardly a great movie, but it is an endearing and charming one, even though after all the dream sequences that studded the movie it was quite annoying that it ended with a final scene in which the whole movie turns out to be Paul’s dream!
