Though widely regarded today as a classic rock music film, A Hard Day's Night was intended by distributor United Artists as nothing more than a vehicle for the production of a profitable soundtrack album - the actual film was, to the moneymen, immaterial. This executive diffidence gave director Lester great creative control, allowing him to imbue the production with a verité aspect, part Italian neorealism and part mockumentary, making A Hard Day's Night, in retrospect, the godfather of This Is Spinal Tap (1984). Lester and the band followed up with Help! (1965), released in what was a banner year for films heralding the British Invasion. What Lester had done for the Beatles, John Boorman would do for the Dave Clark Five in Catch Us If You Can (US: Having a Wonderful Weekend), Jeremy Summers for Gerry and the Pacemakers in Ferry Cross the Mersey, Arthur Lubin for Herman's Hermits in Hold On! (1966), and Hugh Gladwish for the Spencer Davis Group in The Ghost Goes Gear (1966). Evincing more enthusiasm than production value, these films remain evocative of a moment of great change in international pop culture, during which middle-aged men in banker's attire attempted to distill the essence of the new cool.
Go Go Mania was the American release title of Pop Gear (1965), a revue of studio-recorded vignettes of such emerging acts as Herman's Hermits, the Spencer Davis Group, The Animals, Matt Munro (between his popular recordings of the From Russia with Love [1962] and Born Free [1966] themes), Peter and Gordon, The Honeycombs, The Nashville Teens, and the very men of the hour - The Beatles. Well, kind of. Vintage pop exploitation to a T, Go Go Mania pulls a fast one by offering their headliners via found footage, with the Beatles performing "Twist and Shout" and "She Loves You" in vault footage of vastly inferior quality to the Technicolor/Techniscope remainder of Go Go Mania -- not that many back in 1965 were complaining. Though director Fredric Goode was a journeyman hireling better remembered for the directors he assisted (Vincent Sherman, Michael Anderson, J. Lee Thompson) than for his own work, Goode's cinematographer was Geoffrey Unsworth, picking up a quick paycheck between the more prestige gigs of Peter Glenville's Becket (1964) and Laurence Olivier's Othello (1965). Unsworth would go on to lens John Boorman's Zardoz (1974) and Sidney Lumet's Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and died in 1978 while shooting Richard Donner's Superman II (1978) and Roman Polanski's Tess (1979) simultaneously.
Called up on to present the sixteen acts that comprise Go Go Mania was Jimmy Savile, long-time BBC presenter and Top of the Pops frontman. At the time of his death in 2011, Savile was recognized internationally for his charitable works, his commitment to physical fitness (he was a former boxer and longtime marathon runner), his devotion to fundraising, and his experience as a British radio pioneer. (Though he had his precursors, Savile promoted himself as "the original disc jockey," having dragged two turntables and a microphone into one of the many dance halls he managed as early as 1947.) Savile was given the O.B.E. (Order of the British Empire) in 1971 and was knighted in 1990, and counted among his close personal friends British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II (who bestowed upon the entertainer a papal knighthood). Only after Savile's death did allegations arise from far too many corners to ignore of hideously extensive pedophilia and sexual abuse extending back more than fifty years, with many of the victims having been culled from institutions benefiting from Savile's charitable concerns (among them prisons and children's' homes) - all of which serves in retrospect to color Go Go Mania with the unfortunate taint of scandal.
Sources:
The British Pop Music Film: The Beatles and Beyond by Stephen Glynn (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
"Film Goes Beat: Pop Music Films in the Mid-Sixties" by Paul Huckerby, Electric Sheep: A Deviant View of Cinema, www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk
By Richard Harland Smith
