Oh, Yes! Oh, No!

By John Skow

SGT. PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND

Directed by Michael Schultz

Screenplay by Henry Edwards

Someone sew a couple of buttons on Peter Frampton's shirt, and we can get on with this. (Yes, male decolletage is O.K. No, male decolletage in Frampton's case is not O.K.; he lacks a serious thorax.) What we have is an impudent attempt to filmify and cinemogrificate a collection of old Beatles tunes, most of them from the marvelous 1967 LP Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The record is still an amazing concoction. In one more or less coordinated outpouring, it brought together songs that seemed to belong in an old British music hall (Sgt. Pepper itself, and When I'm 64), druggie exhortations and psychedelic visions (Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds), loving mockery of the middle class (She's Leaving Home), a strange, jingly vision of evil (A Day in the Life).

The only coherence was that of mood, but the songs leaked suggestive bits of near-meaning that made beyond-sense, especially when heard through a chemical fog. Re-creating this fog in a film is what Director Michael Schultz and Producer Robert Stigwood have tried to do, and, given the $12 million budget they had, it was inevitable that they would try too hard.

The film's conceit is that the original Sgt. Pepper and his three sidemen were heroic World War I bandsmen who returned to their town of Heartland and, after full lives, bequeathed their instruments to the four little boys who would grow up to become the second Sgt. Pepper band. These are Frampton, a sweet-faced youth with wilted blond hair, and Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb, the brothers who are the Bee Gees.

George Burns, who does an agreeable turn as Mr. Kite, the mayor of Heartland, explains that the idea of a second band worried everyone: "We didn't know how they would sound." Well, they sound all right, enough like the Beatles to be respectful, enough not like them to take note of the eleven years that have gone by.

The action of the movie has the Heartland boys whipped off to Hollywood and exposed, poor things, to the temptation of Big Bucks. There is a splendidly absurd contract-signing orgy, involving some expensive and schizophrenic kidding of the rock world's overdose of money, and soon Frampton has forgotten all about Strawberry Fields (Sandy Farina), the sappily beautiful girl back home. "A difficult one-week rise from obscurity to stardom," as one of the film's captions puts it, follows, and...

The Bee Gees are fresh and lively. Frampton is awful, but since the entire film is camp, and camp camped, awfulness is something to be mined. Things move fast for the first 50 minutes and the audience's reaction is "Oh, yes!" For the last 60 minutes it becomes "Oh, no!" It is not hard to figure out why; too many big names were signed up and had to be used. A few of them: Frankie Howerd as Mean Mr. Mustard; Steve Martin doing his Ronny Graham imitation as he sings Maxwell's Silver Hammer; Billy Preston; a very puzzled-looking Alice Cooper and such rock groups as Aerosmith and Earth, Wind & Fire. "Too much!" was an expression of wonder and admiration in the '60s, but this seems no longer to be true. A theaterful of young people at the invitational screening attended by this reviewer booed the film off the screen.

-- John Skow

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