At last, I got around to watching the original
band documentary parody film, the precursor to This is Spinal Tap and another
step along the way of reminiscing about The Bonzos. In 1975, Eric Idle of Monty
Python and Neil Innes of the Bonzos got together for a sketch parodying the
Beatles. The skits made the transitions to Idle’s appearances on Saturday
Night Live, and then in 1978 this feature film followed, and despite an
iffy start has endured as a bit of a cult classic – though of course, Spinal
Tap does pretty much everything this does, but better: by parodying a whole
movement rather than an individual band, it’s more affectionate and gets laughs
because you know there will be people who actually believe it, and it’s just
got bigger laughs.
All You Need is Cash starts awkwardly, with Eric Idle’s usual trying-too-hard
way of trying to inject laughs into straight exposition casting away all
possibility of veracity without actually being very funny. The parody of the
early Beatles are obvious and predictable, though the music – aping a general
style rather than individual songs – are clever. Fortunately, it gets a lot
better as it goes on, with big laughs in the reporter’s trip to New Orleans, Dirk’s
highly awkward marriage and the brilliant scene where George Harrison (as an
interviewer) asks Michael Palin (as the Rutle Corp.’s spokesperson) about
problems with people stealing things while an increasingly outlandish
succession of items is wheeled out behind them. There are brilliant moments in
the interviews with Mick Jagger and great little cameos from Ron Wood, Roger
McGough and the biggest names from SNL – Aykroyd, Belushi and Murray. It also
has a brilliant parody of the Yellow Submarine animation and expertly
skewers the Maharishi in a surreal way. I also had a fit of giggles to the ‘Ouch!’
video, even though it was the lowest and most politically incorrect form of
humour. Neil Innes’ Lennon impression also develops into a thing of great
brilliance, both in his spoken impression (like the shower sit-in) and
especially in the music – ‘Cheese and Onions’ is a marvel of pinpoint accuracy.
While it’s great that it was released early
enough that John Lennon could appreciate it and fixed on what were relatively
recent events, I had to cringe at how it treated Brian Epstein, no matter how vilified
he has been. I know over a decade is much too long to cry ‘too soon!’ but the
humour aimed at him went from gentle teasing – the awkward interview where it
was suggested all he liked about the Beatles was how tight their trousers were –
to jibes at his being Jewish (his book here being ‘A Cellar Full of Goys’), but
mostly I didn’t like the humour extracted from the Rutles’ awkward reaction to
his death (or, here, his moving to Australia). It all seemed too cruel to be
amusing.
Overall, though, I feel like All You Need is
Cash is under-appreciated. It’s not as good as Spinal Tap, but
almost everyone who loves that film would really enjoy this one, too. But it
seems to me it doesn’t get much of a look in. And that’s a shame.
