On Sunday morning I woke up out of a funny dream that involved the soundtrack album of the 1978 film Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. My first thought after waking was, “wait a minute, was this a film that was actually made, or is this some sort of Mandela-effect thing in my mind?”
I duly verified that, yes, the Sgt. Pepper movie actually exists. I am party to my fair share of conversations about schlocky cinema, but I never hear anyone talk about this one. I distinctly recall that my family owned the double-LP soundtrack album to this movie when I was a little kid, but that was literally my sole reference point for it. It seemed to have been excised from the cultural conversation, for better or for worse.
After this dream, I realized I had to watch Sgt. Pepper. Thanks to the magic of Internet streaming services, on Sunday evening my wife Candi and I sat down and watched it. She was a grown adult when the film was released but she did not even remember it happening. (The effort to memory hole this movie seems to have succeeded!)
Online reviews of Sgt. Pepper are savage, so I was prepared for a bad film. I was not completely prepared for what I saw. It was…a mess, for sure. But it was also a fascinating artifact of late-1970’s entertainment, and it had a surprising political subtext as well.
Let me begin by saying that I am about as friendly an audience for this movie as it could get. I love movie musicals. I never stopped loving the Bee Gees or disco. I like the Beatles and the Sgt. Pepper album well enough (Sgt. Pepper is actually the only one I ever bought), but I am far from a Beatlemaniac. Peter Frampton I can take or leave, but I don’t hate him. I am not scared of high-concept ridiculousness in films. (Case in point: no one else I know is as enthusiastic as I am about Wim Wenders’ five-hour director’s cut of Until the End of the World.) If I can’t warm up to a jukebox musical that recasts discofied Beatles songs as the soundtrack for a morality play about the music industry, who can, really?
In my opinion, the chief problems with Sgt. Pepper come from the flawed structure of its story, not from the acting or production values. I will summarize the story as tightly as I can here, spoilers included. (Content warning: reference below to attempted suicide.)
Billy Shears (Peter Frampton) and his backup band (the Bee Gees) are a revival of the original Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band from Heartland, U.S.A. Back in 1918 Sgt. Pepper’s band somehow brought about the end of World War I with the uplifting power of their music. Years later, after the death of Sgt. Pepper himself, Billy and his band take up the Sgt. Pepper mantle, ostensibly representing the forces of peace, love, and harmony in contemporary times.
As the film begins, Billy and company leave the innocence of Heartland, U.S.A. to go to Los Angeles along with their manager, Dougie Shears (Paul Nicholas), at the summons of B.D. Brockhurst (Donald Pleasance, of all people!). In doing so, Billy leaves behind his lady love, Strawberry Fields (Sandy Farina), to whom he is devoted, but apparently not as much as he is to his music career. The story quickly begins to assume a familiar form: Billy and the band, the disciples of peace, love, and harmony, quickly find themselves seduced by the glamour and fast life of the music industry. They sign a record contract with B.D.’s label BD Records at a drug-fueled dinner straight out of Fellini’s Satyricon. Under B.D.’s influence, our heroes fall in with an all-woman disco/funk band on BD Records called Lucy and the Diamonds (Stargard), who are portrayed as siren-like temptresses (at one point Lucy herself even gets described as “wicked”). Our heroes are quickly on their way to becoming vapid showbusiness phonies when Strawberry Fields shows up to try to call them back to themselves.
So far so good, perhaps. A bit hackneyed, about as silly as an episode of The Monkees, and definitely unfair to Lucy and the Diamonds, but you can see where it’s going.
But then the story leaves the rails almost completely.
After Billy and the boys leave for LA, a certain Mean Mr. Mustard rolls into Heartland on a ramshackle bus. (Frankie Howerd, the British comedian, plays Mustard in his only US film credit.) Mustard, an awkward middle-aged man whose bus includes two robot assistants (!) and a large video screen from which he receives orders, proceeds to corrupt wholesome, upright Heartland via real estate transactions (he opens burger joints! 24-hour mortgage lenders! video arcades!!!!) and develops a genuinely creepy romantic fixation on young, sweet Strawberry Fields.
The height of Mustard’s perfidy, though, is that he, along with his henchman, Brute (Carel Struycken, the giant waiter from Twin Peaks), steal the instruments of the original Sgt. Pepper band (you know, the ones they played to end World War I) from the Sgt. Pepper museum in Heartland. Why? Well, it’s not entirely clear. They seem to have some sort of talismanic significance for the F.V.B. (“Future Villain Band”), from whom Mustard takes his marching orders. The F.V.B. and its fellow travelers have an oft-repeated motto: “We Hate Love, We Hate Joy, We Love Money.” Mustard steals the instruments and distributes them among the main players in F.V.B.’s cabal. When Billy and the boys receive news of the theft, they, with Strawberry Fields in tow, set out to recover the stolen instruments.
The introduction of the F.V.B. and the “recover the talismanic instruments” storyline destroys whatever narrative coherence the movie had, but it also generates, oddly enough, the most compelling sequences in the film. Billy and the band first confront Dr. Maxwell Edison (Steve Martin, at the height of his manic “wild and crazy guy” period), holder of the stolen silver cornet, who runs a clinic of sorts that turns “ugly old corrupt people into handsome young corrupt people.” Steve Martin, as Dr. Maxwell, does an over-the-top version of “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” to a chaotic, frankly frightening sequence in which his energized silver hammer converts, at a tap on the forehead, old people in surgical gowns into young, perky clones wearing khaki shirts and shorts and orange neckerchiefs. (The uniforms’ resemblance to those of the Hitler Youth is too great to be coincidental.) The whole scene plays like yet another outtake from Fellini’s Satyricon, which I mean here as a sincere compliment.
Billy and the boys then recover the stolen tuba from Father Sun (Alice Cooper), who is running a sort of brainwashing academy for the newly minted Hitler Youth. They pause to play a benefit concert back in Heartland headlined by Earth, Wind & Fire, but during the concert Mustard and Brute kidnap Strawberry Fields. After a genuinely creepy scene in which Mustard sings “When I’m Sixty-Four” to a bound and gagged Strawberry, he takes her to F.V.B. headquarters. Billy and company rush off (in a hot air balloon, a byword for speedy travel if there ever was one) to confront the F.V.B. itself—played by Aerosmith. During the showdown, Aerosmith does its now-famous cover of “Come Together,” which is one of the two really compelling performances in the film (the other being Earth, Wind & Fire’s cover of “Got to Get You Into My Life”). During the showdown, Billy overcomes the lead singer of the F.V.B. (Steven Tyler), but Strawberry Fields unfortunately dies in the melee as well. The boys, as well as a chastened BD Records cohort, go back to Heartland for Strawberry’s funeral. The band then begins to put its life back together, but Billy, still distraught over Strawberry’s death, climbs onto the roof of a building on Heartland’s town square and—he actually jumps off.
But then. (It’s a huge “but then.” We need to pause over it for a second.) But then the Sgt. Pepper weathervane on top of the Sgt. Pepper Museum on the Heartland town square comes to life! The magical Sgt. Pepper is none other than Billy Preston, who sings “Get Back” as he drifts down from the roof of the museum (on clearly visible wires), zapping Billy with his magic electrified finger, lifting him back onto the roof he just jumped from mid-fall, and to boot curing his inconsolable dejection. As he sings and dances, Preston zaps away the remaining traces of Mustard’s corruption of Heartland and—if that weren’t enough—zaps into existence (I kid you not) a resurrected Strawberry Fields, seemingly none the worse for being dead and reanimated. (For this feat I dubbed Billy Preston’s finger the Magic Finger of Resurrection.) By the end, all is right with the world, and the show ends with a chorus of about 100 celebrities appear to sing the finale/reprise of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”
Suffice it to say that the story is a lot. A lot a lot. It raises so many questions that it doesn’t even try to answer.[1] The movie also has problems of dramatic pacing as well as mediocre acting by people such as Peter Frampton who aren’t career actors. The fundamental structural problem with this movie, though, that makes the other flaws more obvious is that a third of the way through it exchanges, without explanation, one major dramatic conflict—the “seductions of the music biz vs. love and authenticity” one—for another, and neither conflict resolves convincingly or is even seriously tied to the other one. Billy and the gang start the movie on a clear, if a bit overdone, success/fall/redemption entertainment-biz story arc, only to get derailed into a magical (but politically coded) quest against existential evil in which the vile tempters of the first arc are transformed into passively supportive allies. And all of it with minimal exposition, no dialogue, and a Beatles soundtrack!
No movie could have fulfilled such a brief coherently. It’s so incoherent, such a jumble, that I am left wondering how this entire production even happened. No one has undertaken a thorough exploration of that question that I know of, but the answer undoubtedly lies with the producer, the impresario and media mogul Robert Stigwood. Stigwood in effect owned the Bee Gees as well as the rights to use several Beatles songs and wanted to use both to make a buck. (Or, as we would say today, to maximize ROI on his IP holdings.) Anonymous rumors on the Internet claim that the project was difficult to get off the ground: many actors and bands passed on appearing in it, the Beatles themselves had nothing to do with it, and the Bee Gees, smelling a flop, wanted to back out two weeks into shooting. But Stigwood not only had extensive production experience but also a great deal of power and connections from producing Grease and Saturday Night Fever, and so the film made it into theaters. It’s at least mildly amusing, if not baffling, to observe that the character of B.D. Brockhurst, the unsavory record producer atop BD Records, is a not-very-flattering parody of media moguls like Stigwood himself. The logo of BD Records in the movie even transparently recalls that of RSO Records, Stigwood’s music label.
Sgt. Pepper is really two different movies, two different stories, both underdeveloped and sandwiched together uncomfortably. The music-industry morality play storyline is hackneyed no matter how you cut it, but the F.V.B.-cabal storyline is strange and unexpected and generates the best (if most disturbing) moments in the film. Shorn of the music-industry plot and liberated from the mandate to shoehorn the story into Beatles lyrics, that story could have made for a good movie, maybe even a great one. From the perspective of the USA’s descent into 2025’s fascist-inspired madness, the political subtext of the F.V.B. cabal subplot feels urgent. The narrator characterizes the F.V.B.’s goals as: “poison young minds, pollute the environment, and subvert the democratic process.” Dr. Maxwell’s remolding of “ugly, old corrupt people” into an army of Hitler Youth as part of their program incisively portrays the repackaging of old reactionary hatreds and desire for repression into an eye-pleasing package for newer generations. (It felt a bit like the mission of Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, honestly.) That a major studio film would portray this dynamic just two years before the advent of Ronald Reagan and his recasting of the conservative revolution, whose shadow lingers large over us still, feels almost prophetic.
Sgt. Pepper is not a good film. But as a cultural artifact, it contains so many bits and pieces that are food for thought. If what you want is compelling entertainment, look elsewhere, but if you want to explore a forgotten episode in cinematic history, you can find it on Blu-Ray or rent or buy it digitally on Amazon Prime.
[1] Just some of the unanswered questions here: Why were the original Sgt. Pepper’s instruments so important that they were worth stealing? Was it the instruments themselves that gave Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band the ability to end World War I and make peace? Since we are being this ahistorical, did World War II even happen? Or did the peace and good vibes of the Sgt. Pepper band keep the Treaty of Versailles and the troubles of the Weimar Republic from giving National Socialism a foothold? If Sgt. Pepper’s instruments were so important, why weren’t they better secured—or, even better, why didn’t our heroes take them instruments with them to ensure their success? If the weathervane on top of the Sgt. Pepper museum is really a godlike Billy Preston with the power to undo death itself, why doesn’t he intervene at literally any point in the preceding chaos to set things straight?
Thought Required; Pants Optional. 
