All You Need Is Cash

 

 The Rutles: All You Need is Cash (1978) is a documentary chronicling the rise and fall of the Prefab Four, Liverpool's favorite sons, the Rutles.  Any resemblance to a real0world supergroup from the 1960s is entirely intentional.  I think the real message here is that it's easier to tell a coherent story about the rise and fall of the Beatles when they aren't real.

 

Eric Idle plays . . . well, Eric Idle plays a lot of parts in this, but he plays the Narrator, a documentarian chronicling the early days of the band.  Band members include Dirk McQuickly (Idle), Ron Nasty (Neil Innes), Stig O'Hara (Ricky Fataar), and Barry Wom (John Halsey), whose real name is of course Barrington Womble.  It is quickly obvious who is supposed to be who; Dirk is Paul, Nasty is John, Stig ("The Quiet One") is George, and Barry ("The Noisy One") is Ringo.  The boys meet in Liverpool, form a band, and after sharpening their act in Hamburg, they are discovered by music entrepreneur Leggy Mountbatten (Terence Bayler.)  The band becomes a huge hit, the idols of millions, and soon they are being chased around Britain and America by hordes of screaming girls.

All of which sounds very straightforward, and it is.  There are absurd moments in this section of the movie; Fifth Rutle Leppo Sitoncliff (Ollie Halsall) is last seen in Der Rat Keller in Hamburg, climbing into a small trunk with a smaller German woman.  But things get much weirder when the Rutles start making their own movies.  "A Hard Day's Rut" is just A Hard Day's Night with a silly title, "Ouch!" manages to be even more problematic than Help!, and "The Tragical History Tour" is . . . from the clip we see, the experience of watching "The Tragical History Tour" is almost exactly the same as watching The Magical Mystery Tour.  Some things are beyond parody. And, the little we see of "Yellow Submarine Sandwich" is more surreal and considerably less coherent than Yellow Submarine.

 The band begins to fall apart, gradually and then all at once.  The group[ establishes an organization called Rutle Corps, an apparently charitable organization which immediately loses enormous amounts of money, despite (or perhaps because of) the efforts of brutal promoter Ron Decline (John Belushi).  Stig is drawn to Arthur Sultan, the Surrey Mystic (Henry Woolf).  And Dirk and Nasty both get married.  Dirk falls for French actress Martini (Bianca Jagger), who is barely a parody of Linda McCartney at all.   Nasty is captivated by German conceptual artist Chastity (Gwen Taylor), who is strongly implied to be the daughter of Adolf Hitler, but at least nobody but Mick Jagger (Mick Jagger) blames her for breaking up the band.  (Apparently Yoko Ono found the character hilarious, so I won't quibble.)

All You Need is Cash is packed with celebrity cameos, particularly Saturday Night Live alumni; it's always nice to see Gilda rRdner.  It's the cameo by actual factual George Harrison as an interviewer asking questions about Stig being attacked by the Hell's Angels in the basement that is the real get, though, putting the mockumentary one Beatle ahead of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

 This is a comedy.  It's full of surreal humor and whimsical asides, which is fitting, considering Idle's career and the movies the Beatles made themselves.  It's also surprisingly more coherent than the history of the Beatles.  Reality doesn't have to be realistic, but little tweaks like having the death rumors be centered on Stig/George rather than Paul make a lot more sense.