Photo:
All My Loving Review | Dir. Tony Palmer
“We met over a great deal of brown rice and he said, 'you have a duty’”, director Tony Palmer explains about an early encounter with The Beatles star, John Lennon, and so the blossoming of All My Loving began.
A film about pop in 1968, initially to be aired on the BBC after the epilog, hit London cinema screens again recently. “Everyone demands the existence of heroes...here in Liverpool were born four heroes, The Beatles”, an amusing Pathé news voice states. Offering conflicting views from within the industry, “If it sells, who cares” declares Eddie Rogers of Tin Pan Alley, while The Who’s Pete Townsend argues, “It's crucial it (pop music) should remain as art.” These stand points show that this doc is still tackling focal issues within the music industry some 40 years after it’s making, perhaps Paul McCartney's insight that “Pop music is the classical music of now”, is still relevant.
To say this is only the second film made by Palmer, it is an achievement, though you could be completely forgiven for thinking that it doesn’t do what it says on the tin. Less a documentary about The Beatles, rather this doc focuses on the lesser or unknown bands (at the time) surrounding The Beatles. It is nothing short of impossible to image formative artists such as Cream and Hendrix as anything other than iconic.
All My Loving does provide an ocular rollercoaster of sudden edits - archive footage of thrashing guitars and drums crashing into trance inducing footage of The Who and Pink Floyd, cast in blood red and traffic-light green filters contrasting the jet black backdrop. Not all excitement, with harrowing images of the Vietnam war, Holocaust and Paris riots, we are presented with montage of modern misery, with further interludes of sobriety coming through lyrics such as The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine and Donovan’s The Lullaby Of Spring.
Six years of politically and culturally important music is ruthlessly compressed into not enough minutes with not enough Beatles, but then, there can never be enough Beatles.
