The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash (Above Average Productions, Broadway Video, Rutle, 1978)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, January 14) my husband Charles and I watched a great movie he’d never seen complete before, and I’d seen but not for many years: The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash, a 1978 co-production involving members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and the original cast (most of it, anyway) of Saturday Night Live. It’s, as you might suspect from the title, a spoof of The Beatles, and in particular of all the many ultra-serious documentaries that have been made about the real ones. Narrated by Monty Python’s Eric Idle (who frequently played a newscaster, notably on a Monty Python episode called “Wicker Island,” all of whose inhabitants were newscasters who continually interviewed each other), The Rutles features the “Pre-Fab Four” (ironically The Monkees, the Beatles spinoff created by Columbia Pictures for a half-hour TV sitcom that ran from 1966 to 1968, were also nicknamed the “Pre-Fab Four” because of their obvious imitation of The Beatles): “Ron Nasty” a.k.a. John Lennon (Neil Innes), “Dirk McQuigley” a.k.a. Paul McCartney (Eric Idle), “Stig O’Hara” a.k.a. George Harrison (Rikki Fataar, briefly a member of The Beach Boys in the early 1970’s), and “Barry Wom” a.k.a. Ringo Starr (John Halsey, who ironically looks more like Pete Best, the drummer The Beatles fired on the eve of stardom, than he does like Ringo). The Rutles came from Rutland (described on Wikipedia as “a ceremonial county in the East Midlands of England. It borders Leicestershire to the north and west, Lincolnshire to the north-east, and Northamptonshire to the south-west”), though they’re also depicted (like the real Beatles) as being from Liverpool. My ex-girlfriend Cat owned the Rutles soundtrack album on Warner Bros. Records and it came with an illustrated booklet giving even more details about The Rutles’ story than you got in the film – “Thousands of fans packed Kennedy Airport to await the arrival of The Rutles. Unfortunately, The Rutles flew into LaGuardia.” It was also a fun listen: Neil Innes wrote all the songs and did clever pastiches of Beatles hits, and part of the entertainment value to the album is picking out just what Beatles songs they were parodying. Neil Innes had a direct connection to The Beatles in that he’d been a member of the Bonzo Dog Band, a group that combined music and comedy. The Bonzo Dog Band were in the 1967 Beatles’ TV film Magical Mystery Tour; just before The Beatles do “Your Mother Should Know” the Bonzos play a song alternately titled “Baby, Don’t Do It” and “Death Cab for Cutie.” (The band Death Cab for Cutie got their name from that song.)

The Rutles’ story follows pretty closely on The Beatles’ story: Dirk McQuickly and Ron Nasty meet when they run into each other on the street – literally; Dirk picks the drunken Ron off the ground – and start a band together. They get gigs at The Cavern Club and then get a job offer to play at the Rat Keller in Hamburg, Germany. They live in a rat-infested cellar under the Rat Keller club, and narrator Idle proudly announces, “I’m in the original cellar, with some of the original rats.” Idle’s narration announces that The Rutles found a manager, Leggy Mountbatten (Terence Bayler), who’d lost a leg in World War II and had been “hopping around Liverpool ever since.” Various interviewees explain that what Leggy found attractive about The Rutles was not their music – “He hated their music,” Leggy’s mother Iris (Gwen Taylor) says – but “their trousers,” which were so skin-tight they left nothing to the imagination. (This is a lot funnier if you know that The Beatles’ real manager, Brian Epstein, was Gay.) There’s a great sequence in which narrator Idle announces that he’s gone to New Orleans in search of the origins of The Rutles’ sound. He says he’s standing “on the banks of the Mississippi,” when he’s in fact standing in front of the New Orleans branch of the Hibernia Bank. (Charles said that’s even funnier given that at the height of the Castro Street neighborhood’s status as San Francisco’s Gay Mecca, a well-known cruising ground was behind the Hibernia Bank. The area was jocularly known around Queer San Francisco as “Hibernia Beach.”) Directors Idle and Gary Weis (who got the job having already done filmed inserts for Saturday Night Live) then cut to the actual banks of the Mississippi and interview a Black blues musician who says he got his entire style from The Rutles, quit his job as a railroad brakeman to become a full-time musician, “and I’ve been starving ever since.” He sends Idle to his next-door neighbor who claims that he invented The Rutles’ sound – and his wife, who calls B.S. on him and says, “Every time someone comes around doing a Goddamned music documentary, he says he invented it! He says he invented The Everly Brothers, and Frank Sinatra, and Lawrence Welk … ” – it’s great fun and also wonderful satire on the reverse-racist consensus that has formed around jazz history that says all advances in jazz came from African-American musicians and white ones only copied them.

Ultimately The Rutles make their psychedelic masterpiece, Sgt. Rutter’s Only Darts Club Band, under the influence of a mind-altering substance: tea. (One wonders if Idle and Weis were deliberately reflecting the use of “tea” as slang for marijuana in the 1920’s and 1930’s.) There’s even a reproduction of a newspaper ad for the “Campaign for the Legalisation of Tea,” whose logo is the letters “CLT” formed to look like a teapot. It’s a parody of one the real Beatles signed calling for the decriminalization of LSD. Unfortunately, just as The Rutles are on top of the world’s music and culture, things start to unravel for them. First, their manager, Leggy Mountbatten, decides to abandon them to take a teaching job in Australia. Then The Rutles fall under the orbit of the Surrey mystic Arthur Sultan (Henry Woolf). After that both Ron and Dirk get married: Dirk to Martini (played by Bianca Jagger, real-life wife of rock star Mick Jagger until they divorced shortly after this film aired) and Ron to Chastity (Gwen Taylor), whose father “invented World War II,” according to Idle’s narration. (That has led a lot of commentators on this film to assume that she’s supposed to be Adolf Hitler’s daughter.) Mick Jagger is interviewed in The Rutles along with Paul Simon and Roger McGough, who also had a Beatles connection: he co-founded the comedy-rock band The Scaffold with “Mike McGear,” who was really Michael McCartney, Paul’s brother. Also, The Rutles are depicted as starting a company called “Banana” (after the real Beatles’ Apple) and holding a press conference (much like the way the real Beatles – John and Paul, anyway – gave a press conference that signaled to crazies and crooks all over the world that The Beatles were giving away money). In a great scene, a reporter (played by the real George Harrison) interviews a Banana spokesperson about the allegations that thieves were making off with Banana’s equipment – while a sneak thief makes off with cameras, desks, office furniture, and ultimately the reporter’s microphone.

To stanch the bleeding, Dirk brings in Billy Kodak to handle The Rutles’ financial affairs while the other three Rutles insist on the feared financial genius “Ron Decline,” a.k.a. Allen Klein (a marvelous performance by the late John Belushi), whose reputation is so intimidating Idle tells us that people have literally committed suicide to avoid having to meet with him. This leads to the eventual estrangement and breakup of The Rutles; Idle’s narration says that their last album, Let It Rot, was “released simultaneously as a film, an album, and a lawsuit,” and adds that the Rutles’ breakup was “the end of an era, but the beginning of one for lawyers who could look forward to decades of new litigation.” (In real life, Paul McCartney didn’t want any part of Allen Klein’s management and wanted to sue Klein to break the contract – but his attorneys told him that the only way to break it was to sue the other three Beatles, which he reluctantly did. Later, after Klein so badly screwed up the financial arrangements for George’s Concert for Bangladesh that both the British and American governments made more money in taxes from it than the Bangladeshi government did, George Harrison and John Lennon fired Klein and John later told Paul, “You were right about him.”) The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash is the first “mockumentary” spoof documentary on a rock ‘n’ roll band (anticipating This Is Spinal Tap by three years), and as Charles pointed out it, like Anna Russell’s spoof of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, is a lot funnier the more you know about the real story they’re spoofing. But even if you’re not super into Beatles’ trivia, All You Need Is Cash is great fun – and what I didn’t know is that they made a sequel, Can’t Buy Me Lunch, which is included as a bonus item on the All You Need Is Cash DVD and I heartily look forward to watching it!