Give My Regards To Broad Street is an absolute blast, but only if you adopt the following strategy. Every time you find yourself scratching your head at an illogical plot point or a random sequence that appears to have nothing to do with the rest of the film, repeat this mantra: ‘Paul is the Beatle King, he can do anything’. Accept that, because of his song writing genius, McCartney had earned the absolute right to do what the hell he liked with his expensive, self indulgent folly of a film and you will have a very enjoyable 1hr and 48mins.
Ignore the damning 20% Rotten Tomatoes score and the savage reviews (in his one star review, Roger Ebert said, ‘Broad Street supplies us with a fake crisis, paper-thin characters, and long musical interludes that have been photographed with a remarkable lack of style…the movie treads water with idiotic dream sequences’). Ignore that the film took $1.4mill at the box office but cost $9mill to make. You even have to put aside McCartney’s own opinion that trying to extend what was originally planned to be a one hour TV special (that makes sense; Broad Street shares the rambling, illogical and episodic nature of Magical Mystery Tour) to a feature length film just didn’t work. In Conversations with McCartney, he told author Paul Du Noyer, ‘A feature film has got to have some dynamics, some strength and depth. We didn’t really get round to that…There’s a couple of redeeming features about it, but it’s just not very good.’
Technically, that is true. If you’d paid good money to see the film at the cinema in 1984 you’d have every right to be bitterly disappointed and even to demand a refund. But as this is 2023, you can watch Broad Street for free on YouTube and any true McCartney fan won’t resent investing a little under two hours of their lives to do so.
Broad Street is like an updated Help! but far less offensive (thankfully, racial stereotyping and brownface actors do not feature this time around). Just substitute Ringo’s ring for stolen master tapes as the film’s McGuffin and Leo McKern’s dastardly Clang for John Bennet’s sinister Mr. Rath as the villain of the piece and you have the makings of a plot just about sturdy enough to support a string of musical numbers, dream sequences and dialogue scenes that are meant to represent one day in the life of a rock star.
There’s no real jeopardy and the resolution to the mystery of what happened to those missing tapes (apparently worth £5million; gosh, how thrilling) is laughably weak and not worth waiting for. McCartney, despite having cast himself in the lead role had apparently failed to take a single acting lesson since Help! (or Magical Mystery Tour). So why is Broad Street worth your time?
The first and most obvious thing is the music. Who doesn’t want to watch McCartney sing Beatles classics including ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Here There and Everywhere’ with George Martin looking on from the studio control room (where Geoff Emerick is playing the recording engineer) while Ringo clowns around in the background, trying to find a pair of brushes to play his drums with that you know he’s going to locate just as McCartney plays a final chord.
There’s a brilliant set piece that brings the otherwise rather ordinary song ‘Ballroom Dancing’ to vibrant life, with an all star band that includes Ringo, Dave Edmunds, Chris Spedding and John Paul Jones strutting his stuff in a way he never got the chance to in Led Zeppelin. With a touch of very 80s-style androgyny, Paul and Linda face each other across upright pianos, dressed in matching teddy boy-style blue drape suits. Similarly ‘Not Such a Bad Boy’, which sounds unremarkable when heard on the soundtrack album makes a lot more sense when you see it played with gusto in a faux rehearsal set up with Ringo, Edmunds and the always effortlessly cool Spedding. McCartney looks like he’s having a ball and therefore so do we.
Even the utterly barmy staging of ‘Silly Love Songs’, with the entire band dressed in none-more-80s Toyah-esque garb and Jeffrey Daniel from Shalamar moonwalking and miming out front is a hoot (re-recorded for the film, the version features some fantastically funky playing from Brother’s Johnson bass man Louis Johnson, although he doesn’t appear in the film). While the period costume ‘Elanor’s Dream’ sequence, set to an extended orchestrated version of ‘Elanor Rigby’ doesn’t make an awful of sense, it does at least look grandly cinematic (it’s also reminiscent of the fantasy sequences in Led Zeppelin’s concert film The Song Remains the Same).
It’s also fascinating to see a glimpse of London’s past. By the early 90s, Butlers Wharf near Tower Bridge, where the rehearsal scenes are set, would be gentrified with pricy loft apartments and expensive restaurants, but in the early 80s it was still mostly derelict. A few years after filming, Broad Street railway station, where the film’s, er, ‘climatic’ scene is set, was closed and replaced by what is now Bishopsgate. The closure by the way was due to travellers switching to the London Underground and not fall out from its association with McCartney’s less than magnum opus.
As well as the musical legends mentioned above, the film’s cast includes everyone from Shakespearean actor Ralph Richardson to wrestler Giant Haystacks, comedian Tracy Ulman and Aussie star Bryan Brown (you may have seen him juggling shakers behind the bar with Tom Cruise in Cocktail) and a ton of British character actors such as Philip Jackson and Christopher Ellison which all adds to the entertainment value, at least for viewers of a certain age.
Watching Broad Street, it’s pretty obvious why McCartney decided not to pursue a second career in screenwriting and hasn’t made another feature film since (losing £7.6million probably helped in that particular decision making process). But fans should be glad that he gave it a go, however messy and idiosyncratic the results. The film has a kind of mad energy that keeps your eyes fixed to the screen. It’s never boring because you never quite know what’s going to happen next. While I’d never recommend it to the average viewer, for true Beatle-believers it’s a must watch. Just keep the mantra in mind, ‘Paul is the Beatle King, he can do anything’.
Beatles Handbook rating: 4 stars
Buy the album: Give My Regards to Broad Street
the-beatles.uk 