Synopsis
The Planes. The Janes. The Blitz. The Memories. The Movies. The Stars.
Peter Gabriel is among the rockstars performing the music of Lennon and McCartney against a montage of World War II newsreel footage.
All This and World War II
1976 Directed by Susan Winslow
Director
Studio
Country
Language
Alternative Titles
To imerologio tou fovou, Yesterday - andra världskriget
Genres
Popular reviews
More-
Ever watched footage of the Pearl Harbor bombing and thought 'What this really needs is Leo Sayer singing a cover of 'I Am The Walrus' over the top if it?' or wished that footage of Hitler and the Nazis marching through the streets of Berlin would be more complete with the Magical Mystery Tour accompanying it? This is the concept for one of the oddest movies I have ever seen. ALL THIS AND WORLD WAR 2 (1976) Features back-to-back stock footage of WW2 with a host of Beatles cover songs by The Bee Gees, Tina Turner, Bryan Ferry and others to tie it together. How did this even happen? Either way, it sure makes for a hilarious watch. It is a bit like YouTube before YouTube even existed.
-
Yeesh...
All This and World War II is a shameless, pointless juxtaposition of WWII footage and half-baked Beatles cover songs that for some ungodly reason runs a feature film length of 88 minutes. The movie's theatrical run was cut short after an extremely negative reception and an official home video release has never seen the light of day.
Who decided this was a good idea? Why did someone think Beatles songs and WWII were a good match? The film tries to make connections: Hitler's Nazi parades and rallies are matched with "Magical Mystery Tour", the Japanese flying to Pearl Harbor is paired with "Sun King", but this really only works for fleeting moments before you realize that the entire essence…
-
The concept(and idea) of a WWII(World War II) documentary that basically uses the music of The Beatles throughout the entire film is a bizarre yet intriguing idea,given the fact that it was the 200th. bicentennial celebration year of America and The Beatles were still popular six years after their break-up(with hopes that a reunion would someday happen[which it never did]),which is the basis of this documentary that depicts the history of WWII from its humble beginnings to its loud and violent end in a PG rated manner(without resorting to R-rated SCHINDLER'S LIST and SAVING PRIVATE RYAN antics[nor any concentration camps in sight) as it mainly consists of 40s era WWII film footage and vintage WWII news footage with the music…
-
-
Stock newsreel footage of World War II and clips of Hollywood movies set in the war (including films as recent at this stage as Patton and Tora! Tora! Tora!... both, surely not coincidentally, Fox productions) edited to the rhythm of a collection of dreadful Beatles covers; it's essentially the title sequence of Jojo Rabbit stretched to feature length. Hell, the "Get Back" sequence -- maybe the film's worst thanks to its "comedic" editing of Nazi goose-stepping -- even frames Hitler as the song's "Jojo." This is maybe not inherently worthless as a piece of free-associative montage; in some context it might well have been a Joseph Cornell-like reframing of media years ahead of its time. Unfortunately it's also terribly misguided…
-
Está bien la idea. Podría haber sido un mediometraje y funcionado igual o mejor. Algunos de los covers son horrendos.
-
-
Even stranger than Yesterday, Across the Universe and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
This is another one of those movies which I've known of for years yet hadn't viewed until last night-a big reason why is that until recently it was incredibly hard to track down, as this is one of those infamous flops, at least at the time. Once I describe what this bizarre documentary is, its lack of success should be readily apparent.
Why exactly someone thought of having a smorgasbord of different popular musical acts doing covers of songs by The Beatles and having this music be the backdrop to... a cursory glance of World War II... I have no damn idea, but this is actually…
-
I got the opportunity to program the Film Society meeting, and this is the film I chose. A rather sincere, but incredibly misguided, documentary that mixed footage of World War II with the music of The Beatles. A train wreck that has never received a proper home video release and, given all the potential copyright issues, probably never will. Still, something to search out...
-
This has to be one of the most inexplicable films I've ever seen. For the life of me, I can't understand the thought processes of anyone who put this together; from the executives who greenlit this project, to the filmmakers who assembled it. The mind reels...
-
One of the all time classic WTF Were They Smoking novelty films, all the more shocking for having emerged from a major studio. Here's a can't-lose proposition: World War II stock footage scored to syrupy string-intensive covers of Beatles songs. What could possibly go wrong? This is a great one to have on hand if you need to passive-aggressively break up a party for whatever reason.
-
Basically a mixtape blown up, given a high-budget soundtrack and released to theaters, this is a Cliff's Notes history of World War II with newsreel footage and old movie clips set to Beatles covers. Some of them are good, some of them are bad, and Frankie Laine's straight reading of "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" is definitely a WTF moment. The songs are linked to the images, some very well (Leo Sayer doing "The Long And Winding Road" over a montage of POWs and soldiers dragging through the war comes to mind), and some not as well (Rod Stewart's version of "Get Back" matched with goosestepping Nazis). The main problem I had with this was that some of the intriguing covers only…