Liverpool After the Beatles

By RICHARD CORLISS

NO SURRENDER Directed by Peter Smith; Screenplay by Alan Bleasdale

Once upon a time -- Was it really just 20, 22 years ago? -- Liverpool seemed about the hippest place on earth. Adoptive kid brothers of Lennon and McCartney made pilgrimages to the Cavern, to Brian Epstein's record store, to the holy homes of the Fab Four. Teenagers from Connecticut assumed the adenoidal lilt of the Mersey accent and recited lines from A Hard Day's Night with the fervor of mimic acolytes. It was not only the Beatles' music that inspired this love for all things Liverpudlian. It was the discovery of an English city -- working class and influenced by Irish and American adventurers -- that had seen it all and was not easily impressed. A fond parodic cynicism rode the crest of every inflection; a suspicion of all things posh lurked in the slurs and slang. This was the perfect voice to carry pop culture through the mid-'60s, till things went tragic and the Beatles turned into eminences cloistered enough to be their own parodies.

These days, to judge from its appearance in No Surrender, Liverpool looks like Beirut without the palm trees. The streets are grizzled; the council flats could have been designed by the architect for Attica; the Charleston Club, a night spot where most of the film's action unspools, is a little triumph of dejected bad taste. Young predators attack a blind pensioner or prowl parking lots in search of black mischief. And the police are apt to break into the wrong home and leave the place a shambles. Seems it happens all the time. "We'll get a carpenter straight out, sir," says one apologetic bobby. "We have them on standby. For incidents such as this." But if the city is drained of color, there are rainbows in the language. One of No Surrender's pleasures for an out-of-towner is the discovery that wit and edge did not desert Liverpool when the Beatles went south.

Mike (Michael Angelis) will need every resource of irony this New Year's Eve. It is his first night as manager of the Charleston Club, which is a laundry for money amassed by a very violent mob. But Mike has other worries: "I've got a group who can't play music, one bad comedian plus boyfriend, a nervous breakdown calling himself a magician, two coachloads of 70-year-old ( religious maniacs looking for a fight, and a fancy-dress contest that nobody knew about." The fanatics are warring Irish Catholics and Protestants, a half-century's resentment festering between them. They spike their drinks with faith baiting and engage, Casablanca-style, in fierce simultaneous renditions of Ave Maria and The Sash. By midnight one pensioner will suffer a fatal heart attack, an Ulster terrorist will be strangled by an old boyo, and two aged gents will duke it out in the men's room. Did we mention? No Surrender is a comedy.

This is comedy of the funny-peculiar bent, and not so much ensemble as communal. Like Sparrows Can't Sing, Joan Littlewood's delicious pub-crawl farce of the '60s, No Surrender flaunts too many characters, plotlets and reversals of mood but still manages to hold together splendidly. Thank Screenwriter Alan Bleasdale (whose elegy to Elvis Presley, "Are You Lonesome Tonight?", played the West End last year) for the film's wild pungency. He is ably abetted by a cast of vet actors and a few odd-jobbers like Rock Star Elvis Costello, who has a funny turn as the stage-frighted magician with a dead rabbit under his top hat. The rabbit is the only stiff in this fine time at the movies. And Bleasdale is the best thing to come out of Liverpool since John, Paul, George and Ringo.