The Incomplete Guide to One to One: John and Yoko and the Beatles Cinematic Universe
In which Elliot gets to watch another Beatles concert at the cinema, sort of.
One to One: John and Yoko
The first thing to say about One to One is that it’s not just another film where an influential Beatles enthusiast has just remastered a pile of archive tapes. Not that that would have been a bad thing, but this is so much more than that. It’s a stunning cinematic experience that could have gone by a name like 1972: The Movie, it just happens that our way into that year is the lives of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. It’s a concert movie, but also, a character study.
The Beatles, having disbanded in 1970, have gone their separate ways. Having conquered the world of music in his 20s, Lennon enters his 30s with his new wife, and spent 1972 mingling with radicals and other artists across the USA. Yoko is focused on trying to win back custody of her daughter, having been forcibly estranged by her romance with Lennon.
Kevin MacDonald is on directing duties (who’s previou credits include documentaries like One Day in September and Witney, so a very safe pair of hands). He has found a really interesting way to distinguish this from other Beatles films by mixing in two key elements: Firstly, the titles tell us that the that John and Yoko have moved to a small apartment in Greenwich Village, New York. Secondly, we’re told and shown that the pair were fascinated by American TV. MacDonald approaches these factors of their lives in 1972 with brilliance.
The film constantly cuts between the story of the year, and a reconstruction of their apartment, in all of its mess and grit, but the camera’s, the audience’s perspective is constantly taking us behind the scenes of the lives of John and Yoko. Like a Ghost, the camera holds the audience and around the apartment, and with the TV never far from view. In one of the early talk show clips of the pair, John remarks on how much he loves watching the telly, marvelling at America’s sheer variety of 24 TV to watch, so MacDonald has us flick through TV channels with them. Car adverts, the latest advances in home appliances (washers and dryers!), TV shows, cartoons, car adverts, the news, car adverts, lingerie adverts, all flavours of Americana through television is given to us.
MacDonald told Empire that the phone calls throughout were a late addition, a box tapes that Sean Lennon found. It seemed that John and Yoko were recording all of their calls in 1972, partly for prosperity, but also to have their own record as they feared that they were having their phones tapped by the FBI. Which they were. We get stunning insights like John’s secret plans to fund a bail for incarcerated black people, his, as it turns out, accurate fear about the FBI, and Yoko’s plans to open a catalogue and her staff’s desperate and farcical attempts to buy flies for a farm. I am not making this up.
All of this is mixed with aplomb with remastered footage and sound from John’s one and only post-Beatles concert: The One to One fundraiser, something he put on for the children of the Willowbrook Institution. The concert was filmed by Phil Spector, badly, so its only thanks to modern technology that we can experience John performing in all his glory.
As John and Yoko integrate themselves into activist communities and try and to join the revolution, one thing becomes clear, no-one’s quite sure what the revolution is other than ending war. Communist and centrist factions clash as some just want to restore life to normalcy. If 1968 was a boiling point of America’s internal chaos, 1972 was the water boiling out of the pot and splashing conflict everywhere else and no-one quite knowing what to do about it. The footage of Richard Nixon looms over everything, presented in the same villainy that Trump occupies our modern day consciousness, and it seems that no-one knows what to do about him.
The sound design is stunning, the found footage is fascinating, and the story is a tale as old as time. It’s somehow personal and specific while being about so much more than the sum of its parts. A worthy addition to the strange canon of Beatles cinema, even though, as John frequently says, he’s no longer a Beatle in this film.
Good luck to Sam Mendes for his upcoming quartet of biopics!
Much of the information I’ve put in the article above was sourced from Empire’s excellent interview with director, Kevin McDonald, on their podcast, here
The Beatles in Cinema
Having enjoyed yet another trip to the cinema, it’s sort remarkable how The Beatles ingratiated themselves with cinema and TV right from the start. There are too many documentaries to go through here, but here’s the highlights. I say highlights, not all of them are good, but are fascinating cultural artefacts.
In the 60s alone, The Beatles were in the cinema on 5 occasions. These films aren’t even really films, often featuring fictionalised, heightened, and cartoon versions of the fab four.
A Hard Day’s Night
A Hard Day’s Night is basically an episode of the goon show, with Charlie-Chaplin-style running and farce, as these versions of The Beatles take the mickey out of what its like to be in a popular band. As The Beatles were one of the first achieve such a thing, this would popularise myths about band stereotypes, with each of the band filling a random stereotype each (Paul being ‘the cut one’, John being ‘the smart one’, etc). The blurred line between reality and fiction then fed into the lives of the band.
The plot, if you can call it that, is that The Beatles are trying to get to a London television performance that they’re due to appear on. That’s it. Their songs are crammed in along the way. What this isn’t is a story about who The Beatles are or what they mean, (it was 1964, that can’t have been decided yet, surely). What it was was an excuse to go and listen to Beatles music in the cinema and see the four of them up to adventures. In a world where they weren’t available 24/7, it was oddly eye-opening and essential to building their myth.
Help!
Help! is a much more unusual affair. The Beatles have to rescue Ringo from a cult intent on sacrificing him. Richard Lester returns as director, and had more money to play with and it shows. It’s not necessarily creatively better, but its shot around the world, in the Austrian Alps, the Bahamas, and Twickenham.
Imagine if the 60’s Batman series had been full of music videos. You don’t have to imagine that hard.
Anyway, we’re going to skip Magical Mystery Tour. It was for television, not cinema, and descended even further into circus-like farce.
Yellow Submarine
One of the most important films of my childhood. It is something of an adaptation of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and full of original songs. A wonderfully mad technicolour animation, taking place in Pepperland: ‘an unearthly paradise a thousand leagues beneath the sea’ where Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band are the source of all joy. Then the Blue Meanies show up and conquer Pepperland. Then a strange old sailor, Old Fred, boards the Yellow Submarine to escape to the surface and get The Beatles to help them.
Is it an alternate reality? Is the whole thing an accurate depiction of what its like to be on LSD? The Cartoon versions of The Beatles adventure down Pepperland, through a series of increasingly bizarre and crazy lands, including the sea of time (‘When I’m 64’), and the nowhere land (‘Nowhere Man’). It is an explosion of colour and presents a childlike delight. The plot is paper thin, yet it feels more dramatic and weighty than both A Hard Day’s Night and Help!
I managed to see it in a cinema for its 40th anniversary reissue in 2018, and it was spectacular.
The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years
Ron Howard’s documentary from 2015 is an absolutely magnificent part of The Beatles’ canon in cinema and quite underrated. Ron Howard produced the film with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr and the surviving widows as they’re known, Olivia Harrison and Yoko Ono. The film is a frank and in-depth exploration of their touring years, (hence the title), but was revolutionary for its new audio production on old concert recordings. Until this, so much footage of The Beatles performing was drowned out by intense screaming. The screaming and overreaction to their very existence, of course, led to The Beatles retreating to the studio for Sgt Pepper’s onwards.
The notable aspect of this was the Shea Stadium concert, remastered. I will never forget watching the concert, as if being broadcast like a modern Glastonbury set, in Picturehouse Central’s glorious Dolby Atmos system in their first summer open. Unforgettable stuff.
Speaking of Beatles concerts in cinemas…
Let It Be / Get Back
The film crew that watched The Beatles developing the album and film that both became Let It Be in 1970 and remerged, remastered in 2022 as the seminal three-part series on Disney+, Get Back thanks to Peter Jackson. It’s truly fascinating to watch Paul pull the song Get Back out of thin air, and watch them discuss what they are as a band and what they’ve become as a piece of culture. They sort of knew history was gazing at them through cameras, but to capture them conjuring the ideas so magically is truly mind-boggling.
My viewing experience was all the more enhanced holding back the final hour of Get Back by watching the remastered rooftop concert itself in the cinema. One of the most significant events in history, a true one-off, made accessible for the world to see in the true anarchic spirit it was intended, with cameras capturing the police attempt to shut them down.
Let It Be and Get Back are both on Disney+
Do you have a favourite Beatles film? Let us know in the comments.