22 hours Ago By Ed Power
The cast for the quintet of Fab Four flicks was revealed this week, and here the big talking point is that 50 per cent of the screen version of pop’s most iconic foursome is to be Irish. Paul Mescal will play Paul McCartney while Barry Keoghan is to bring his trademark wit and levity to the part of Beatles prankster-in-chief, Ringo Starr. There is lots of excitement around the news, and fans of the band will hope that Mendes is kinder to the Beatles than he was to James Bond , whom he put through the wringer with the dreadful Spectre.
But the question nonetheless remains: why four Beatles flicks – and why now? [ The Beatles: Paul Mescal and Barry Keoghan confirmed to play Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr in Sam Mendes’s Fab Four biopics Opens in new window ] The answer is that the entertainment industry has collectively decided that Beatles content is as close as you can get to a sure thing in a world beset by uncertainty. It isn’t just cinema. Bookshelves groan under the weight of new Beatles tomes.
In the past six months alone, we have seen Ian Leslie’s John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, which analyses the duo’s relationship through the prism of their songwriting, and I Don’t Like Your Tie, which reimagines, over and over, a random piece of banter between George Harrison and future Beatles producer George Martin. On streaming, The Beatles are likewise ubiquitous. Mendes’s Beatles project will come on the heels of last year’s Prime Video feature Midas Man – a biopic about the band’s manager Brian Epstein.
In November Disney + debuted Beatles ‘64, a laboured documentary about their early forays in America produced by Martin Scorsese and padded out with extraneous interviews with figures such as David Lynch, Terence Trent D’arby and literary scholar Jane Tompkins. The Beatles are enormously influential – but you do have to wonder if our obsession is veering towards the unhealthy. It would be like walking into the history section of a bookshop only to discover every title was about the second World War.
Sure, it’s a hefty topic – but not the only one. What’s hard to fathom is the lack of interest Hollywood and the publishing industry show in any act not named the Beatles. Surely a Rolling Stones biopic would be as intriguing as yet another Beatles movie? Where are the films about the life and death of Sam Cooke or Syd Barrett’s traumatic departure from Pink Floyd – or the struggles in a male-dominated industry of Laura Nyro, Joni Mitchell or Janis Joplin? How about a Crosby, Stills and Nash movie set against the backdrop of the huge societal upheavals American was going through in the early 1970s? That there is so much more to 20th-century music than The Beatles was underscored by the recent success of the Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown .
The film was a breath of fresh air – not only because of a commanding performance by Timothée Chalamet but because it was willing to countenance a version of the 1960s that didn’t revolve 100 per cent around The Beatles going on the Ed Sullivan Show for the first time. The Beatles were – and what an understatement this is – among pop’s supreme innovators, though not everyone is a fan. Lou Reed famously dismissed The Beatles as “garbage” (and you can argue that his group, The Velvet Underground, were every bit as influential as John and Macca).
For his part, Michael Stipe of REM once said that the quartet “were elevator music in my lifetime”. That is, of course, a minority viewpoint – but with four Mendes movies on the way, we are fast approaching peak Beatles. They were icons of the 20th century but we are at the point where we need to move past our fab fascination.
To quote a criminally unheralded 1960s tunesmith, when it comes to The Beatles, it is time to let it be..
