Give My Regards to Broad Street

 Give My Regards to Broad Street (1984) was written and produced by Paul McCartney, so it's a good opportunity to see how much he's learned about film-making since Magical Mystery Tour.  The results are mixed.

 

The plot of Broad Street (and it does actually have one!) is remarkably straightforward: Paul McCartney falls asleep in a limousine.  Okay, it's a little more complicated than that.  Paul dreams that he is driving in a flashier car, on his way to a business meeting.  The bright red car phone rings, and it's bad news. Harry (Ian Hastings) is missing, and he has the master tapes for the new album; since Harry is an ex-con whom Paul gave a second chance to, so everyone assumes that he's taken the tapes.  Worse yet, if the master tapes aren't recovered by midnight, the Paul McCartney music empire will fall into the hands of sinister financier Mr. Rath (John Bennett) for complicated business reasons.

And Paul McCartney is a lot of things, but he is not a detective, so he lets the police do their jobs and goes about his day, rehearsing and filming videos with his band, including wife Linda (Linda McCartney) and drummer Ringo (Ringo Starr), though Ringo spends a great deal of the film flirting with a beautiful journalist (Barbara Bach, Ringo's real life wife), and quite successfully, too.  Ringo's got rizz, as the kids will probably stop saying any minute now.

 That doesn't mean that Paul isn't worried about Harry, though; he keeps drifting in and out of elaborate daydreams about what might have happened to him, including a lengthy chase through the foggy streets of Victorian London.  And he also finds time to try and comfort Sandra (Tracy Ullman), Harry's . . . partner?  The relationship is never made clear.  Still, Paul handles the music, his right hand man Steve (Bryan Brown) handles the business, and the police are theoretically handling the investigation.

 But the plot is only there to string the songs together.  There are a lot of songs, a generous mix of Beatles songs and songs from Wings and Paul's solo albums, and while the movie flopped, the soundtrack was a big success.  

The movie definitely makes more sense than Magical Mystery Tour, but it's a very sedate affair, lacking the frenetic energy of the earlier film.  On the other hand, there's an actual story, and Paul's character has an actual arc, grappling with the question of whether he was right to trust Harry.  (He was right, because there's no way that Paul McCartney of all people is going to make a movie where cynicism is the right choice; sunny optimism is his brand!) 

More than that, Give My Regards to Broad Street has an actual theme!   Paul isn't just promoting a new album, he's trying to protect his legacy, and the "Greatest Hits" nature of the soundtrack helps with that.  The threat is that Paul will lose control of the music that he's created.  Fortunately the threat is averted, and now I will take a big sip of coffee while reading about what happened to the Beatles' catalog in 1985.

On the other hand, while the plot is more substantial than the plot of Magical Mystery Tour, it's still not very substantial.  The movie is very slight, more like a concert video with a framing device, and it doesn't help that the plot turns out to be all a dream.  There is an actual movie here, but it's really just an excuse for silly love songs.  And what's wrong with that?