All My Loving is award-winning
filmmaker Tony Palmer’s groundbreaking documentary on music and its effect on
pop culture in the late ’60s, with previously unseen footage from The Beatles,
Cream, Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Pink Floyd and many more. Produced for the BBC and
initially broadcast in 1968 only after being nervously shelved by fuddy-duddy
types for six months, the project was born out of a collaboration and challenge
of sorts from John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who tasked Palmer, then a
classical music documentarian, to make a film that encompassed the radical
changes taking place in the music world at that time. Alternately interesting
and hallucinatory, this hour-long title, powered by performances and chats, finally
makes its DVD debut, and while some of the pertinence is dented by time, there
remains an undeniable, slurry time-capsule value to it.
Daily
Express’ James Thomas said at the time, a “hideous, clamorous force” about All My Loving, which leans mightily on
production affectation. And if some of the interview segments are indulgent and
unfocused, they’re almost all compellingly photographed in their own way, and
there’s no denying the worth of the British television debuts of Hendrix, Pink
Floyd (who had just lost Syd Barrett), Frank Zappa, Cream and the Animals’ Eric
Burden. The film passingly examines notions of audiences hero worship, but also
how keen almost all of these musicians are to change the world through the
power of their music. “Pop music is crucial to today’s art,” Pete Townsend
points out.
Palmer’s grand innovation comes in the striking
juxtapositions that he makes of the aftermath of the “Summer of Love” and the
beginning of the peace movement with all the violence that is still raging
around the world. There’s a razor’s-edge, in-your-face defiance to the manner
in which he intertwines gruesome newsreel footage with woozy performance pieces,
and sometimes the metaphorical dots connect and sometimes they don’t. For my
money, it was a
Opera House performance by The Who that stood out as much as anything else,
courtesy of Townsend’s wild head-butting antics and mic stand playing. At the
bit’s conclusion, a fan runs up and furtively grabs a souvenir — as much for
the sheer shock value of what he’s just witnessed as anything else, it seems.
presented in full-screen, and housed in a clear, regular Amray case. In
addition to a 90-second montage of Ralph Steadman cartoons set to the music of
Cream’s “Born Under a Bad Sign,” the DVD comes with a supplemental extra that’s
quite worthwhile if still a very shaggy, unpruned affair — a new, 40-minute interview with
Palmer conducted by Jon Kirkman, who mostly lobs a few softballs at his subject
and gets out of the way for Palmer’s lengthy, digressive responses. Palmer
talks about meeting Lennon as a student in 1963 at the
premiere of A Hard Day’s Night, and also
amusingly details the reactions of BBC management upon his completion of the
movie. For more information, click here, or to
purchase the disc on Amazon, click here.
B- (Movie) B (Disc)
The interview footage is far more interesting than you give it credit for. I knew very little about hte music of the era, but found the chats with Townsend, Burden and the other musicians very fascinating. If half of their optimism came out of today’s rock bands, we’d be in a different place, I think!