Hard to believe that in just a months time John Lennon, the most infamous member of the Beatles, would have been celebrating his 73d birthday. In the 33 years since he was gunned down outside the Dakota the attention to his colorful life never seems to dim. A couple of years ago there was Sam Taylor-Wood’s excellent movie ‘Nowhere Boy’ a fictionalised account of Lennon’s unusual childhood, and next week sees the release of a hot new documentary ‘Good Ol’ Freda’ which tells the Beatles old secretary/p.a. Freda Kelly’s account of life with the Fab Four in their heydays.
I came across this made for Brit TV movie which was a dramatised re-telling of Lennon’s early life from his first taste of fame up until his tumultuous and histrionic exit from the UK to which he never returned. It starts in 1964 when The Beatles had their first No I Hit ‘Please Please Me’ (and when in fact I first got to see them perform live in my hometown, which sadly is somehow omitted from the film).
Success is fast and furious and Lennon has married his childhood sweetheart Cynthia and they live with their young son Julian in a ridiculously outrageous unsuitable house in a stockbroker belt in the London suburbs simply because they could afford it and so much more. With each success comes untold wealth and the re-emergence of Lennon’s own father who had deserted the family home when John was just 6 years. His anger with his father is very real but it still doesn’t eventual stop him also up and abandoning his own son very shortly.
Lennon’s constant search for a sense of something more profound and spiritual in his life results in an aborted trip to a Guru in India, and eventually to the eccentric performance pieces of avant garde artist Yoko Ono.
In Ono, Lennon either sees a kindred spirit or possibly just a suitable avenue to indulge in unsociable behaviour whilst making enormous impossible demands on everyone else in their lives. Robert Jones unbalanced script ensures that we unceasingly see the way that Lennon and Ono acted together as both obnoxious and positively psychotic. He does everything to please this woman for whom he has thoughtlessly abandoned his wife and son, and is about to jettison The Beatles future together too. Director Edmund Coulthard unwisely chose to mix archive footage of the real Beatles with his dramatisation which only proved how so unlike them his miscast actors were. Poor Christopher Eccelston (one of the Doctor Who’s) was too old for the part but at least he fared better in his series of bad wigs than Andrew Scott playing Paul McCartney with a most excruciatingly bad accent.
The title was for the fact that the piece was intended to get the inside scoop on what made this man tick. It failed to do that completely, but Christopher Eccleston did literally bare all quite proudly posing with an equally stripped Yoko, so the title still fits.
Mocked by the Press for some of their zany escapades and harassed by the Police for their drug use, Lennon and Ono flew to a new life in New York hoping to be free (and naked?) at last. He was killed a mere nine years later.
Unless you are an avid Lennon fan I would miss this one, and rent ‘Nowhere Boy’ and go see ‘Good Ol’ Freda’ when it opens. And there is so much more to come …there is a musical movie in production right now called ‘The Mersey Boys’. We so havent heard the last of Lennon yet.
★★★
