Stephanie Fremaux's The Beatles on Screen: From Pop Stars to Musicians surveys all of the Beatles’ films, promotional videos, their full length animated feature Yellow Submarine (1968) and the cartoon series. Fremaux demonstrates the extent to which all the Beatles’ screen media texts in the period 1964–1970 reflect their evolution from boy-band ‘pop stars’ to countercultural artists. Fremaux describes the Beatles’ development in a vivid, lively and colourful manner. Her in-depth academic expertise combined with her infectious Beatles fandom, comes together to create the most definitive discussion of the Beatles’ films published so far.
The book is divided into nine chapters with an introduction and a short conclusion covering A Hard Day's Night (Richard Lester, 1964), Help! (Richard Lester, 1965), ABC's Beatles Cartoon series (1965), Magical Mystery Tour (The Beatles, 1967), Yellow Submarine (George Dunning, 1968), Let It Be (Michael Lindsay-Hogg, 1970) and Michael Lindsay-Hogg's promotional films for ‘Revolution’ and ‘Hey Jude’, both 1968. In her introduction Fremaux argues that ‘Image was […] the vehicle that the Beatles used to explore and navigate their musical development and maturation’ (p. 8). Although this is an idea first discussed by Michael Frontani in his book The Beatles: Image and the Media (Reference Frontani2007), Fremaux expands and develops this in an innovative way.
Fremaux's analysis of A Hard Day's Night in Chapter one captures the film's aesthetics well: Richard Lester's use of hand-held cameras is reminiscent of the jerky and frenetic style of Jean-Luc Godard's era defining French New Wave films. Her descriptions of the realistic and gritty bomb-site London locations of A Hard Day's Night demonstrate how the film is reminiscent of the monochrome and grainy British ‘kitchen-sink’ dramas.
Fremaux demonstrates the extent to which the Beatles’ next film, Help!, is a parody of the 1960s spy genre, such as Ian Fleming's James Bond and Len Deighton's Harry Palmer. Fremaux finds that, as well as being a spy satire, Help! is also a surrealist meditation on the Beatles’ new-found fame as pop superstars. Another theme in Help! is the attendant fan mania and madness entrapping the band in an unprecedented frenzy of adulation. Fremaux argues that the common theme linking A Hard Day's Night and Help! is that both films are a riff on entrapment and freedom. A Hard Day's Night contrasts the freedom of the Beatles running in the park, accompanied by the non-diegetic music of ‘Can't Buy Me Love’, to the ensnaring pandemonium of Beatlemania in the Scala Theatre. In Help! the Beatles try to evade violent attack, and the only freedom to be found in this film is the scenes of the Beatles playing as a band (incidentally the Beatles hated the film and felt oppressed by an awful script). The film Help! was a watershed for the group and the last time on screen that they promulgated their wacky, easy-going, mop-top personae. After Help! they were so bored and frustrated with their ‘boy next door’ image that the next two years found the Beatles ‘radically experiment[ing] with the function of image to push boundaries’ and reflecting their artistic renaissance as musicians and artists.
Magical Mystery Tour captures the cultural moment when the Beatles’ media image as artist experimenters is enshrined on celluloid. Fremaux argues that Magical Mystery Tour, along with the promotional films for ‘Paperback Writer’ (1966), ‘Rain’ (1966) and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ (1967), are the apotheosis of the Beatles as musicians and rock auteurs. Fremaux powerfully evokes the extent to which the Beatles shed their mop-top image; she writes lyrically in sparklingly bright New Journalese about the ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ promotional film: ‘As the Beatles sit around the piano, George plucks the wires, and in another shot (2.59) the Beatles are painting the piano with abstract strokes and various colours as the footage then switches to an overexposed effect. This sequence of shots reinforces that music is not merely a commercial product to be dictated by the rules of pop music structure, but, rather, music can be experimental art’ (p. 82). In these films particularly, the Beatles have cracked the shell of their boy band carapace to reveal psychedelic rebels intent on conveying adult themes such as LSD use, the madness of Beatlemania and the shallowness of fame.
The counterculture Beatles image was put into glorious technicolour effect in their animated full-length feature, Yellow Submarine. Fremaux puts Yellow Submarine in sharp relief by contrasting it with ABC's asinine Beatles cartoon, again emphasising the trope of artist vs. artisan. In this chapter Fremaux offers superb analysis of the Rotoscoping and Kodalith techniques of the ‘Eleanor Rigby’ sequence contrasting the ‘dark and anonymous’ (p. 108) terraced houses of working-class Liverpool with the rainbow-hued fantasy of Pepperland.
The last film the Beatles worked on while still together as a band was the observational documentary, Let It Be where Michael Lindsay-Hogg's camera frames the Beatles in deep browns and expressionist shadows and we are shown a hirsute and exhausted band very different from the quixotic dreamers of Magical Mystery Tour and the psychedelic cartoon jokers of Yellow Submarine. Fremaux argues that Let It Be is a slice-of-life realism which shows the band ‘returning to their rough rock and roll roots’ (p. 146). The final chapter in this excellent book examines the post-break up legacy of the Beatles in Ron Howard's Eight Days A Week: The Touring Years (2016). Here Fremaux ‘explores how the Beatles had perceived themselves and how they were being perceived by fans and by critics’ (p. 152).
In sum, then, The Beatles on Screen: From Pop Stars to Musicians is the first book authoritatively and expertly to examine the Beatles’ screen work. The narrative is clear and direct at all times; the book is expertly researched to produce a gold-standard academic text, which uncovers and analyses the films in an innovative and original style.
