‘All This and World War II’: The Beatles Movie Nobody Asked For, Nobody Saw and Nobody Remembers

Pulled from theaters almost as quickly as it was released in 1976, this bizarre experimental documentary pairs an all-star selection of Beatles covers with images of WWII.

In the early 1970s, Russ Regan had a dream. In this dream, the music of the Beatles accompanied scenes from World War II. For most people, having such a dream would be the end of the story, but then most people aren’t longtime music executives in charge of 20th Century Records, a record label owned by Fox. 

“I dreamt it, actually wrote it all down. I woke up in the middle of the night, wrote these different things down,” Regan told Ear Candy Mag in 2005, “and we made a sort of a documentary movie about World War II with the Beatles’ music.” Thus, Regan’s dream became a reality, first as a four-sided album filled with Beatles covers, then as a film released in theaters in November of 1976, where it was received so harshly it was pulled from theaters after two weeks and never spoken of again.

Well, almost never spoken of anyway. While it seems like nearly every offshoot of the Beatles enjoys some kind of following, All This and World War II has languished in obscurity with little call for the vault containing it to be opened. It’s rarely screened and has never been (legitimately) released on any home video format. Its soundtrack includes contributions from Elton John, Peter Gabriel, The Bee Gees, Tina Turner, The Four Seasons, The Brothers Johnson, Jeff Lynne and many others—some of them previously recorded but many cut especially for the film—but is essentially only encountered by those thumbing through old LPs who pause and wonder, “Wait: What is this?”

So what is it? As one of those record store browsers, I’d been curious for years—an interest also stirred by a Dissolve piece by our friend Noel Murray—and curiosity finally got the better of me after hearing Elton John’s (pretty terrific) 1974 version of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” on the radio.* This required a trip to a site that hosts otherwise unavailable rare films. (I won’t name it, but it’s easy to find and not hard to get lost in.) It also required a lot of patience to watch from beginning to end. Put bluntly, All This and World War II is one of the most appalling miscalculations I’ve ever seen, a bad idea stretched to a torturous 83-minute running time.

Though bad from start to finish, the film’s worst moments come early. A clip of Charlie Chan (Sidney Toler) skeptically receiving the news of Neville Chamberlain’s “Peace in our time” declaration in the 1939 film City in Darkness gives way to acover of “Magical Mystery Tour” by ’70s soft-rock giants Ambrosia.  Accompanying the song: footage of swastika banners, German soldiers marching in formation, and a climactic appearance from a smiling Adolf Hitler, by implication the organizer of the “mystery tour” that was World War II.

If there are meaningful, or at least not appallingly literal-minded, connections to be made between World War II and the music of the Beatles, All This and World War II never finds them. A Bee Gees cover of “Golden Slumbers” accompanies footage of Londoners sleeping in the Underground during the Blitz. Leo Sayer performs “Let it Be” to images of American Nazi collaborators being arrested and (in an iffy bit of parallelism) Japanese-Americans being shipped to internment camps. As the tide of the war turns, Status Quo performs “Getting Better.” Hitler makes several more appearances. Early in the film he’s accompanied by Helen Reddy’s “Fool on the Hill.” In its later moments, Rod Stewart’s version of “Get Back” becomes a taunt as his fortunes turn.

The best that can be said about the film is that it might have been worse. There’s no footage of the Holocaust, which in another World War II doc would seem like erasure but here comes as a blessed relief. And though it seems like we’ll be spared any references to Hiroshima or Nagasaki, the film’s finale (set, of course, to “The End”) ends on a mushroom cloud. In a separate interview with Ear Candy, researcher Joe Adamson mentions that at one point Christopher Guest, Bill Murray and Brian Doyle-Murray, then virtual unknowns associated with National Lampoon, were brought in as potential contributors. That this came to nothing is probably for the best. A comedic take on the project could only have gone to even more questionable places.

Some of the music is quite good. I don’t think I’ve heard Bryan Ferry’s “She’s Leaving Home” or Peter Gabriel’s “Strawberry Fields Forever” anywhere else. They don’t come close to redeeming the movie, however. When the film arrived at Pearl Harbor, I found myself thinking, “Oh no! There’s a lot of war left to cover!”

Critics at the time largely rejected the film, though few as harshly as Desmond Ryan in the Philadelphia Inquirer, whose review called the film “a juxtaposition of the century’s most traumatic experience with Beatles tunes [that] leave the impression of someone playing a kazoo at Beethoven’s funeral.” In the Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas called it “a tasteless, even offensive attempt to get some more mileage out of some Beatles standards and some wartime Fox MovieTone News footage.” They weren’t out of step with the masses who stayed away.

Which raises the question: Who was this supposed to be for anyway? Speaking to UPI, soundtrack producer Lou Reizner claimed it had noble intentions. “It would have been easy to take the music of the era and dub it to match the action on screen. But we’d have lost the young audience. We want all age groups to see this picture because we think it makes a statement about the absurdity of war. It is the definitive anti-war film.” 

Though the film—which is bloodless and largely avoids any combat scenes apart from aerial dogfights—was rated G, its other potential audience seemed to be the midnight movie crowd who could gaze on the juxtaposition of Lennon and McCartney and Roosevelt and Churchill with stoned wonder. They didn’t turn out either.

More tellingly, they, and other connoisseurs of cinematic oddities, never found it later, either. Released in an era when every movie with an aura of weirdness seemed destined to pick up some kind of following, All This and World War II has remained a cult film in search of cult.** In some ways, the weirdest thing about the film is that a project filled with songs from the most popular band of the 20th century, one that featured John Lennon and Paul McCartney could leave such a tiny footprint. But, despite so many indicators to the contrary, it does exist. And take it from me: that’s all you need to know.

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* John’s recording predates the movie, but Regan signed him when he was an up-and-coming star, so it probably wasn’t much trouble to secure it.

** Call it the first entry in The Reveal’s No Cult Canon.