ALL THIS AND WORLD WAR II (1976) **

All This and World War II is an assemblage of WWII stock footage interspersed with scenes from old WWII movies set to Beatles songs.  Well, covers of Beatles songs to be exact.  It’s not very good, but it’s just bizarre enough to hold your attention and leave you scratching your head.

I have a soft spot for this sort of nonsense.  It reminds me of something they’d play on Night Flight back in the day in the wee hours of the morning.  It was made during the pre-MTV days when filmmakers were still experimenting with ways to merge pop music with a visual narrative.  Like most experiments, it’s a failure, but there are a few definite highlights.

The covers are mostly terrible, and they almost always are an ill fit to the action on screen.  It’s kind of surreal hearing country and western legend Frankie (Blazing Saddles) Laine singing “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” while Laurel and Hardy, Jimmy Stewart, and Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy enlist.  Some marriages of sight and sound are just stupefying, like watching Pearl Harbor being bombed to the tune of Leo Sayer’s rendition of “I am the Walrus”.  The Battle of Midway, set to Elton John singing “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, works slightly better, but it still feels a little tone deaf (in more ways than one).

Laine’s cover of “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” is probably the best song in the bunch.  (It’s a lot better than Steve Martin’s version from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, that’s for sure.)  The majority of the covers are just plain bad though, and some of them border on thoroughly unlistenable.  Even the songs that sound like they can’t miss fail spectacularly (like Tina Turner’s “Come Together”) and the ones that must’ve looked good on paper (like The Brothers Johnson doing “Hey Jude”) are big disappointments.  (They should’ve used the Wilson Pickett version.)  

This review is coming from someone who isn’t a Beatles fan, so your mileage may vary.  As someone who enjoys weird shit, it went down smooth enough.  I’d certainly rather watch this over that Across the Universe bullshit any day.