comment #1

thevisceral says ...

I always liked that line.

comment #2

gruver1 says ...

Wells to Visceral: Why? Because you like inanity? Try and pull out more than just those five words to explain where you're coming from.

comment #3

Mgmax says ...

Of course, this is before Sgt. Pepper, Revolver, even A Hard Day's Night. The only thing it's not before is scads of screaming young teenagers going bonkers over how cute the Beatles and their music ("Yeah, yeah, yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, Yeah yeah yeah yeah") were. In that context it's not really any more old-farty than someone today making a Hannah Montana joke.

comment #4

Mgmax says ...

(Before someone contradicts me, even if the movie came out after Hard Day's Night, it was almost certainly shot well before.)

comment #5

gruver1 says ...

Wells to Mgmax: Bullshit. Goldfinger was out in December 1964 -- four months after the opening of A Hard Day's Night. They could have easily written and looped a new line. Connery was turned away from the camera and everything. Producer Albert "Cubby" Broccoli obviously wasn't hip or fast enough to get what was going on.

comment #6

Stephe96 says ...

It sounds like Mr. Burns' comment about the Beatles on an episode of 'The Simpsons': "I seem to remember their off-key caterwauling on the old Sullivan show. What Ed saw in them I'll never know."

comment #7

Mgmax says ...

Jeff, you're still assuming that the release of a (much to everyone's surprise intelligent and good) movie would have changed the whole culture so quickly that another cultural force would have bowed down to it.

The fact is, the biggest thing to have come from Britain in 1964 wasn't the Beatles, it was Bond, and why should Bond, the epitome of adult cool, have felt the need to pay tribute to a teenybopper phenomenon? Wouldn't that, in fact, have wrecked everything that Bond's cool was about? You're seeing the Beatles with post-60s eyes here.

"THIS is going to surprise you—it may knock you right out of your chair—but the new film with those incredible chaps, the Beatles, is a whale of a comedy... In the first place, it's a wonderfully lively and altogether good-natured spoof of the juvenile madness called "Beatlemania," the current spreading craze of otherwise healthy young people for the four British lads with the shaggy hair...

"Sure, the frequent and brazen "yah-yah-yahing" of the fellows when they break into song may be grating. To ears not tuned to it, it has moronic monotony. But it is always relieved by pictorial compositions that suggest travesties—or, at least intelligent awareness of the absurdity of the Beatle craze." --Bosley Crowther's review of A Hard Day's Night, 8/12/64

comment #8

SpinDozer says ...

I'd say that reaction was far from uncommon. Look for hip/with it's who thought Elvis was great in 57. The difference with the Beatles is that their pre-Pepper music did receive some positive notice. It's been a couple of decades since I could quote it, but I believe some establishment figure publicly declared his admiration for the sophisticated structure of 'Eight Days A Week'? I thought it was Arthur Schlesinger Jr. but haven't been able to find the quote (he did say some pretty nasty things about the Beatles too).

comment #9

Terry McCarty says ...

And Ella Fitzgerald must have liked "Can't Buy Me Love" enough to cover it.

comment #10

Rich S. says ...

Must not have upset the Beatles too much. They recorded that cool Bond-esque intro for the single version of Help! the very next year.

Still, the line does remind one of the old Steve Allen routine where he used to read song lyrics without the music. I'm pretty sure he even did it to the Beatles.

comment #11

cjKennedy says ...

Goldfinger was made back in the good old days before movies were made for 13-year-old boys. The target audience probably agreed with the sentiment, no matter how unhip.

comment #12

Marty Melville says ...

"Must not have upset the Beatles too much. They recorded that cool Bond-esque intro for the single version of Help! the very next year."

That was for Capitol's Americanized/Bastardized version of the Help soundtrack... the Bond bit and the general re-jiggering of of the original U.K. Help soundtrack was mightily frowned on by The Beatles.

That said, I love some of the loungy George Martin instrumentals on the U.S. release.

comment #13

CinemaPhreek says ...

I think this post is actually bouncing back and making the poster look old farty.

This is back when Bond was still acting like Fleming's ideal, not some producer trying to woo teens to the cinema. It is entirely within character for Bond to dismiss the Liverpool Lads at this point in history.

Christ, Wells, you have such a black/white view of the world. A cool character like Bond can only be such if he recognizes everything else that is cool in the world at the time.

Bond is man of refined tastes who isn't going to be wooing women to the strains of "Love Me Do."

comment #14

nemo says ...

In college I had a friend who was convinced that all the great literary figures he admired probably shared his political opinions.

A professor of his said this was like expecting your friends from camp to like your friends from school.

comment #15

Doug Pratt says ...

Goldfinger came out in Dec of 64, but the line would have been written months earlier, when the popular view among adults was that the group was just a kiddie fad. Remember, he was still wearing a hat then, too.

comment #16

shawn says ...

"The fact is, the biggest thing to have come from Britain in 1964 wasn't the Beatles, it was Bond,"

Gotta disagree here. The Beatles had the top Five slots on the Billboard singles charts in the spring of '64 at the same time -- an unimaginable feat for an imported act before or since. At one point, they had seven simultaneous singles in the Hot 100, plus covers and tributes by other artists. Again, unprecedented and unequalled.

The two Bond films prior to "Goldfinger" did really well, but "Goldfinger" was the first to finish in the year's top five at the US boxoffice.

Bond's lame joke has far more to do with the differences of class and age that the rise of the Beatles and like working class heroes highlighted in British culture. Bond the character was as deeply invested in the old upper class as you could be without being royal or inheriting wealth: an Etonian, a Cambridge grad and a WWII vet with passions for golf, clothes, fine wine, etc.. The Beatles, Stones, etc. were the end of his world, and he knew it. He could joke about their rise -- good for export and all that. But he and his type were dying even as he was living more vividly than ever before. It's a sad wheeze, but bittersweet. Bond = the guy in the train carriage who tells the Beatles "I fought the war for your sort" and who is deflated by Ringo's immortal, "I bet you're sorry you won."

comment #17

shawn says ...

PS: I actually wrote a book about all this -- "Ready, Steady, Go! The Smashing Rise and Giddy Fall of Swinging London." And Bond -- and, for that matter, Connery -- really weren't a part of that scene. Bond was considered too show biz a creation (and too old); and Connery was doggedly Scottish and married and land-lordish and never really ran with the Ad Lib/discotheque crowd (Michael Caine did...). FWIW.

comment #18

Mgmax says ...

Shawn, I enjoyed your book several years ago, and your analysis of why Bond would make that joke is certainly apt, but I still disagree that the Beatles trumped Bond then-- in 1964 it wasn't obvious that youth culture was going to replace adult culture, and Bond was a triumph of the dominant adult culture, expected to last like Sinatra or scotch or Julie Andrews, while the Beatles were the fad of the moment among the kiddies, who would soon shift their enthusiasm somewhere else, as they had from Elvis, Fabian, and other teen idols. While the Beatles may have dominated the pop charts, they were NOT that impressive at the box office; in first release (per Variety) A Hard Day's Night and Help! each did about $5 million in domestic rentals, which is great for a teen exploitation movie, but chump change next to $19 million for Goldfinger or $26 million for Thunderball, one of the biggest hits of the decade.

Even if you granted back then that The Beatles were more than usually sharp for kid's music-- and I'm not necessarily convinced that She Loves You-era Beatles WERE smarter than, say, Phil Spector, though they soon took pop music into new realms-- there was no reason in 1964 to expect that they'd transform the broader culture, any more than Bobby Sherman or The Beach Boys would. Let alone that they'd eventually render passe something as universally appealing to the dads with the checkbooks as a two-fisted, smoothly British sex magnet fighting lurid crypto-Nazi baddies. Yeah, that'll go out of fashion about as soon as my wife goes to work and makes more money than me.

comment #19

Marty Melville says ...

Isn't part of the appeal of Bond that he's a little square anyway?

He's a fixed point in an always changing world: the last thing he stands for is change (which The Beatles certainly did).

And it's what makes the standard Bond end title "... but James Bond will be back in ______" always so satisfying and comforting.

comment #20

K. Bowen says ...

Maybe Daniel Craig should have a scene in which his iPod contains the latest American Idol winner, or whatever it is the kids listen to today.

comment #21

Chris Willman says ...

Mgmax, you're showing your (young, I presume) age if you don't think the Beatles in 1964 were a major cultural revolution that Bond in 1964 couldn't hold a candle to. "The fact is, the biggest thing to have come from Britain in 1964 wasn't the Beatles, it was Bond." Sorry, but this has got to be a joke, right? "While the Beatles may have dominated the pop charts, they were NOT that impressive at the box office"--this is like saying that because "The Greatest Story Ever Told" wasn't that monstrous a hit, Jesus' impact is overrated. (Sorry to be bringing it back to Jesus today.) It's just a weirdly cinema-myopic thing to say.

And yeah, I saw "Goldfinger" at the Orpheum a few weeks ago and you could practically feel the entire audience go into shock at this line. It was in character, AND it dates the movie in an utterly bizarre way, so everybody is right here.

comment #22

Chris Willman says ...

I would add that, while you can make a good case that the line is in character, it clearly wouldn't have been in there if Cubby Broccoli hadn't mistakenly expected the audience to chuckle or whoop in agreement. It's just a good thing he didn't throw in an extraneous scene where Odd Job scalps somebody's Beatlecut.

comment #23

shawn says ...

Mgmax: We seem to be arguing the same sides of two different coins. When you said Bond was bigger than the Beatles, I thought you were implying 'at that very moment that Connery spoke the line on a film set' and that 'bigger' meant 'commercially bigger.' Clearly at that moment the Beatle's cultural impact hadn't yet emerged, and clearly Bond spoke to a larger status quo. But I don't think that means that the Beatles impact on pop music and their moneymaking ability hadn't yet been realized. And surely by the end of the summer of '64, when "AHDN" was being celebrated even by the fusty likes of Bosley Crowther, it became clear that there was another kind of writing on the wall. None of which means that Bond's films didn't make more money than the Beatles' or that Robert Macnamara didn't prefer "Goldfinger" to "Help!" It kind of all depends on what your definition of 'big' is (and 'was' is, too, for that matter).

Complicating all of this, as well, is the Henry James theme -- that these things look different depending on which side of Plymouth Rock you're standing on. From the American prospective, Bond, queerly, seemed more one of us than did the Beatles: nobody thought we were being invaded by 007 when he showed up. For the English, it was more the opposite; the Bond movies were made by an American company (so were the Beatles', which of course had an American director, but movies weren't their main business) and Fleming's books were considered very Suez Crisis and all.

(Somewhere there's a Dr. Who episode in which people in the future are watching a clip of the Beatles on the BBC on a screen in the belly of a robot and somebody says something like 'Classical music!')

So. Like I say: We basically agree about some overlapping but slightly unrelated things. Cheers.

comment #24

MickTravis says ...

I love Beatle-centric debate and all, but I mostly find it ironic that Wells complains about the line yet still drops a headscratcher in the exact same vein one or two times a week. Whether it's saying Ellen Page is too scrawny to get a teenage boy excited enough to nail her, or that he doesn't like Leone because of all the "portentous close-ups."

comment #25

bb says ...

Wouldn't it have been embarrassingly old farty if James Bond had expressed a liking for the Beatles in a desperate attempt to be hip? Their music wasn't appealing to guys like Bond. He drank martinis. He wore tuxes. He had a license to kill for god's sake.

Did Bond ever do the twist or hang out at some happening, tuning in and dropping out? I mean before Roger Moore of course.

comment #26

Edward says ...

In '64 I was at a party and all they played was the Beatles first American release. Boy, did I hate the Beatles after that. The following summer I saw "A Hard Days Night" and I became a fan of the Beatles and Richard Lester.

comment #27

Mgmax says ...

Actually, Jesus (in the form of The Greatest Story Ever Told) vastly outperformed the Beatles at the box office too. Lennon was wrong, at least at the movies.

I think we're circling around the same set of facts with conclusions that aren't terribly different. Mine is, the youth market was still in the process of going from being a ghetto to be exploited to the dominant side of the culture in 1964. I'd say that hadn't really happened in the movies until at least 1967-8 (when adults over 40 stopped going to the movies in huge numbers and overall movie attendance largely cratered, though some youth-oriented films-- 2001, The Graduate, etc.-- did extremely well). 1964 was a turning point... but turning points are often not obvious at the time.

comment #28

Arizona Joe says ...

I think Shawn's comment explains the situation. I was not surprised when he revealed himself to be the author of, "Ready, Steady, Go!"

As far as mocking the Beatles before the Revolver/ Sgt. Pepper artistic period of their careers, that's nonsense. If you prefer Phil Spector's sound to George Martin, there's no accounting for taste.

Deriding the "She Loves You" era Beatles betrays an ignorance of pop music. In fact, there's a recent book which explains the significance of this fare, "The Beatles Second Album," by Dave Marsh. The author more or less says it's the most under-appreciated Beatles album and the one which affords the most insight into the Beatles' sound.

Connery as Bond was as pragmatic as he was debonair. He had a job to do, and had an Apollonian cast. The Beatles, with elements of underground black America and hillbillies, were decidedly Dionysian. Bond and the Beatles were as different as mist and mast.

James Coburn, as Our Man Flint, he was much more of a hipster on screen and off.

comment #29

Marty Melville says ...

"James Coburn, as Our Man Flint, he was much more of a hipster on screen and off."

The Beatles had definitely taken hold by the time Coburn and Flint showed up.... so Flint was our first psychedelic spy.

Then Dino came along with Matt Helm and tried to shift course back to Connery's old-guard ways (with Vegas humor attached)...

and then Richard Burton came along and really got retro (in black and white, yet). Party pooper.

comment #30

moviemaniac2002 says ...

Interestingly, Thunderball and Help! shot in the
Bahamas virtually back to back, although I don't think Connery and the foursome ever ran into each other.
What's fun is savoring the insane non-sequitor
lines in other Bond films...as in Jill St.John's retort to a pesky kid in "Diamonds Are Forever"...
...quoth Jill: "Blow up your pants!"
Or the faux-Blofeld's plea to Roger Moore in
"For Your Eyes Only" (while he's stuck on the skid of helicopter Moore is piloting) "Please! I'll
give you a delicitessan made of stainless steel!"
Say what??