The Film: 2/5

Before I begin this review, allow me to drop a few fact bombs on you.

1) The Beatles are one of the greatest bands in the world. Their music is endlessly enjoyable and has influenced every generation of singers and songwriters that have come along since.

2) The Bee Gees are lame. So very, very lame. I associate their music with boring Caucasians snorting Columbian marching powder, wearing bad clothes and cheap imitation gold medallions, and dancing like they’re having seizures.

3) So-called “jukebox musicals” merely exist to cash in on the popularity of beloved musicians and bands and exploit the nostalgic longings of their most rabidly devoted fans.

4) I like Peter Frampton, but if he didn’t exist at all, I don’t think that the history of rock music would be impacted in the slightest. His biggest-selling album was a concert recording full of laidback FM radio dreck. You know the one. According to that great philosopher Wayne Campbell, if you lived in the suburbs you were issued it, and it came in the mail along with samples of Tide.

5) It’s a shame we don’t get free samples of Tide in the mail anymore, but Entertainment Weekly keeps pestering to pay to renew a subscription I received for nothing in the first place. Those poor fools with their instantly disposable magazine.

With those five things in mind, I present to you 1978’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, one of the single most notorious examples of overweening artistic hubris ever captured on 35mm film. Emboldened by the success of the movie adaptations of the Who’s classic rock opera Tommy and the blockbuster Broadway musical Grease, producer Robert Stigwood teamed up with former Beatles manager George Martin to take twenty of the band’s best-known songs and build a lavish big screen music extravaganza around them. New York Times rock critic Henry Edwards was brought in to construct a narrative just sturdy enough to be strung together by the Beatles tunes, and Michael Schultz (Cooley High, Car Wash) seized the directorial reigns on the independently-financed $13 million production that Universal Pictures then paid to distribute theatrically.

The plot is loosely based on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on the Road, an off-Broadway musical produced by Stigwood that opened in November 1974 and closed after just 66 performances. In the small Midwestern town of Heartland there lives a group of musicians known as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band who have brought joy to the world with their music for decades. When the bandleader dies, their instruments are taken to Heartland’s City Hall and his grandson, “the one and only Billy Shears” (Frampton) is tasked with putting together a new Club Band for the modern age with his longtime friends, the Henderson brothers (The Bee Gees). The band becomes Heartland’s favorite sons and soon the unscrupulous Los Angeles record producer B.D. (Donald Pleasance) is inviting them out to the West Coast and offering them a recording contract with his company Big Deal Records that will make them international celebrities and bring them wealth and decadence beyond their wildest dreams.

If that was all there was to the plot then the movie might merely be a deadly dull affair, but once the band heads to Hollywood, things really get weird. The evil real estate magnate Mr. Mustard (Frankie Howerd) and his female robot assistants are given orders to steal the band’s fabled instruments and deliver them to several willing recipients. The pleasant town of Heartland soon starts to resemble Times Square of the 1970’s and the band, under the sway of B.D. and their fame and fortune, loses sight of that which truly matters in life – playing bad covers of Beatles classics before crowds of fawning morons who have clearly never heard the originals (or are at least trying to pretend like they are) – and Billy forgets about his virginal sweetheart Strawberry Fields (Sandy Farina), compelling her to leave the safety of Heartland in search of her vapid rock star love.

An explosion of instantly dated fashions and disco-infused sets captured in glorious Technicolor by the great cinematographer Owen Roizman (best known for shooting the masterpieces The French Connection, The Exorcist, and Network), Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is a monumentally misguided and ill-timed enterprise that was screwed at its inception and the filmmakers foolishly believed that throwing money, music, and famous faces at the audience would bamboozle them into thinking they were watching a real movie and not a filmed Hollywood party. “A Splendid Time Is Guaranteed For All”, crowed the marketing campaign, but the only ones appearing to have fun with this grotesque endeavor born of unadulterated greed and cynicism are the people who made it.

The film that came to mind the most for me as I watched Sgt. Pepper was Ken Russell’s brilliant aforementioned adaptation of the Who’s Tommy, as both mostly eliminated dialogue and kept their on-camera performers singing from beginning to end (only Sgt. Pepper has any spoken lines, delivered as narration by George Burns, playing Heartland’s kindly mayor Mr. Kite). Both films also understood that rock stars may have made for captivating and charismatic presences on stage and in the studio, but in front of a movie camera they were likely to freeze up and go limp, resulting in flat performances that would have left the hard work of everyone involved with the production open for ridicule.

However, Tommy’s wall-to-wall soundtrack had a built-in narrative with characters and events that were easy to follow thanks to Pete Townsend’s sublime lyrical mastery. Sgt. Pepper’s plot is clumsily constructed out of a large selection of unrelated Beatles songs that screenwriter Edwards desperately attempts to make work but fails to do so because it leaves us with characters each possessing of less than a single dimension, relationships that never engage our interest, and scenes that fail to build proper narrative momentum. The script can’t even effectively balance the dueling storylines about the band’s descent into utilitarian excess and avarice and their quest to retrieve the instruments stolen by Mr. Mustard so harmony can be restored to Heartland and the world. One is suddenly abandoned for the other and then practically forgotten.

The pacing is dragged down even more when the threadbare story stops dead in its tracks for an unnecessary musical number, and boy howdy are there a ton of those. Editor Christopher Holmes (Five Easy Pieces) does what he can to keep things moving as best as possible, and the flashy, high dollar production design by Brian Eatwell (The Man Who Fell to Earth) certainly provides some impressive visual nose candy for the audience to enjoy when they can’t make head or tail of the story, but it’s ultimately all for naught. You start to feel like a cat being distracted by a laser pointer so they don’t notice that they’re about to be neutered.

Michael Schultz has made some fine films in his career, but he works best on a smaller scale that permits him to focus on developing likeable characters and allowing them to organically create interesting dynamics. He appears hopeless when confronted with Sgt. Pepper’s soulless excess and lack of story and can do little but marshal the onscreen talent through their endless concert and dance sequences as he were overseeing the filming of an episode of The Brady Bunch Variety Hour. Plus, he doesn’t have the berserk visionary genius that allowed Ken Russell to transform a surrealistic rock opera into eye-opening cinematic majesty. I doubt any talented filmmaker could have reached into the cultural miasma concocted by Robert Stigwood and his arrogant (and most likely coked to the goddamn gills) enablers and pulled off a halfway decent movie, so it’s to Schultz’s credit that Sgt. Pepper at least looks like a real movie helmed by a competent professional with only the best of intentions…. the kind that pave the road to Hell.

Frampton and the Gibbs fare the worst of the movie’s cadre of performers as they manage to sound like the Beatles at times but are forced to mangle the band’s legendary catalog with a series of opportunistic covers that lack the playful whimsy and heartbroken soul Lennon and McCarthy brought to each song. Ironically, it’s everyone but the actual stars of Sgt. Pepper that are able to put unique spins on the classics. As the money-hungry plastic surgeon Dr. Maxwell, Steve Martin livens up his rendition of “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” with the gonzo silliness he made his name with during his days as a stand-up comedian. Aerosmith remake “Come Together” to sleazy perfection in their roles as the antagonistic Future Villain Band, and Alice Cooper is granted license to gleefully pervert “Because” into the anthem of a brain-washed consumerist cult. I also enjoyed Earth, Wind, & Fire’s funkified take on “Got to Get You into My Life” and watching Burns bring a little of the old vaudeville magic to “Fixing a Hole”.

The rest of the cast is a mixed bag. The late Donald Pleasance made his appearance here as the repellent music mogul B.D., horrific hairpiece and all, in the same year that his performance as Dr. Loomis in John Carpenter’s Halloween made him a horror cinema icon, but it’s that cheeseball toupee and wardrobe that make more of an impression that he does. Whatever the forgettable Sandy Farina’s day job was before playing Strawberry Fields, she should have just stuck to doing. If you ever wanted to see future Addams Family/Twin Peaks player Carel Struycken in a tank top and bicycle short shorts playing B.D.’s henchman Brute, you’re in luck.

Have I even mentioned the part where Heartland’s beloved Sgt. Pepper weather vane comes to life in the form of R&B great Billy Preston and proceeds to completely undo the tragic events of the movie’s second half with lightning bolts from his fingers and a passable rendition of “Get Back”, thus proving that emotion and character growth are meaningless and death is just another pesky nuisance to be overcome with bad music and special effects? Oh wait, I guess I just did. My apologies.

Ultimately though, Schultz is considerate enough to save the worst for last – an all-star (and I use that term very lightly) discotheque-ready performance of Sgt. Pepper’s title track barely brought to life by a choir that includes Carol Channing, Wolfman Jack, Stephen Bishop, Curtis Mayfield, Bonnie Raitt, Tina Turner, Leif Garrett, and Keith freaking Carradine (not his actual middle name). For a perfect storm of suckitude such as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, it’s the only way this inept, wholesale defiling of a landmark in the history of rock music could conclude. Still, it beats the hell out of Rock of Ages.

Audio/Video: 4/5

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band sure does look and sound mighty fine on Blu-ray. Shout! Factory’s 1080p high-definition transfer presents the film in its original 2.35:1 widescreen aspect ratio and the picture quality is clean, full of vibrant colors that really make the retina-scorching wardrobe and production design pop off the screen, and a noticeable absence of print damage. Film grain is kept to an acceptable and consistent level and image stability is excellent. Although shot on 35mm film, 70mm blow-up prints were screened theatrically as well with 6-track Dolby Stereo sound. The regular 35mm engagements also received Dolby soundtracks, and the dual audio options provided for this release do an excellent job of recreating both experiences. The English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track is the much richer and spacious of the two, a pleasurable arrangement that spreads the layered sound mix generously across every available channel and doesn’t contain a single trace of distortion or damage. You’ll find similar results on the English DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 stereo track, but at a slightly higher volume that never necessitates manual adjustment. English subtitles have also been provided.

Extras: 2/5

The best of the slim assortment of supplements assembled for this Blu-ray is the audio commentary from pop culture historian Russell Dyball, who manages to fill his time in front of the mic with a great deal of fascinating and relevant information. The track is actually far more enlightening and fun than the feature it accompanies. Head over to the special features menu and you’ll also find a full-frame theatrical trailer (3 minutes) and two still galleries, one of black & white and color stills from the movie and the another of a series of trading cards released as a promotional gimmick (2 minutes each).

Overall: 3/5

If you enjoy lousy movie musicals (seriously, who the hell are you people?!), then the monumentally boneheaded Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band just might give your fix with its garish costume and production design, adult contemporary-friendly remakes of iconic Beatles songs, and the occasional imaginative cover by artists with genuine talent. Shout! Factory’s Blu-ray presentation deserves a recommendation on the strength of its A/V presentation that is undoubtedly superior to past VHS and DVD releases and the informative commentary from Russell Dyball, but you’ll be watching this one at your own risk, my friends.