Ringo Starr

  • Lisztomania (1975)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) Circumstances dictated that I ended up watching writer-director Ken Russell’s Lisztomania in two halves, interrupted in the middle of the film’s best-known scene featuring more phallic imagery than any thousand randomly selected films. If Russell had rolled to credits right after that, I would have given Lisztomania a far more positive review than this one. Alas, the film keeps going, and going, and going… and it’s clear that, for all of the dizzyingly comic razzle-dazzle of the film’s first third, there’s not much of a focus to it all: this wildly dramatized biography of 19th century musician Franz Liszt may have a lot of energy, but it’s not sustained nor tied together. Some things work really well, though: the idea of treating Liszt like a rockstar may not be as fresh today, but it’s given a maximalist treatment that bounces from erotic excess to absurdist humour. There’s clearly a 1970s rock aesthetic to the entire thing, what with rock star Roger Daltrey (of The Who) as Liszt, and Ringo Starr popping up late in the film as none other than The Pope. It gets wild. As Wikipedia says, and I can’t encapsulate it better than this quote: “Liszt and the women decide to fly to Earth in a spaceship to destroy Wagner-Hitler, who has now ravaged Berlin in a fiery machine-gun frenzy.” And yet, at the same time, it doesn’t: at 103 minutes, the film outstays its welcome and can’t quite cash the checks it wrote during its first half. The delirious scene-to-scene invention can’t be sustained or linked together, and that eventually starts to grate. The film’s production history partially accounts for this disconnection: Russell, never a particularly disciplined director, went through the film without a finished script, regularly ran out of money, and grossly ran out of time in a difficult situation with investors. There’s clearly a lack of control here that often spins the surrealist outrageousness into a dull bore. Despite some real admiration for Lisztomania and a feeling that it hasn’t aged as badly as some other mid-1970s productions, it’s clear that the film could have been much, much better if Russell had managed to control his worst impulses.

  • Help! (1965)

    Help! (1965)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, September 2019) History suggests that The Beatles were high during a substantial portion of Help!’s production, which may explain why the film seems to stumble during its execution, circling its concept without reliably hitting its marks. It also serves to explain the bizarre sense of humour, a blend of non sequiturs and deadpan—history tells us the script is from The Goon Show alumni, but to modern viewers it will feel a lot like pre-weaponized Monty Python. The plot (and there’s one) has to do with murderous cultists pursuing Ringo Starr for the ring that’s stuck on his finger, but never mind that: This being from The Beatles, the highlights are musical interludes that feel like pre-MTV music videos, with the group goofing around as hard as they can. My favourite part of the film is probably the on-screen text adding contextual information and added jokes—the intermission alone is also very funny. Compared to A Hard Day’s Night, Help! feels very different: Not quite about the people’s idea of The Beatles and more about themselves. The budget is clearly higher and the script considerably less coherent—although that kind of anything-goes humour can have its charm as well. (The scene in which the Beatles record a song in the middle of a field, protected by a ring of tanks, is special.)  In keeping with the times, there’s quite a bit of Bond parody made even funnier by Bond saying that he didn’t like The Beatles in the previous year’s Goldfinger. The editing can be lighting-fast at times, helping the film stay remarkably interesting while still being dated in its references to the mid-1960s. It’s all goofy fun, but it’s clear why A Hard Day’s Night holds up better and is more often shown these days.