All This and World War II

This documentary was released in 1976 and I was never able to watch it because the film flopped at the box office and never made it to my small hometown. To my surprise, I accidentally found it streaming on YouTube. It's never been released on any media VHS, laser disc, or DVD. I had almost given up entirely on finding it. If historical documentaries, old 1940s WWII movies, & Beatles songs are your thing, please give it a look. Thank goodness for YouTube. And of course, this won't be everyone's cup of tea. I always watch historical WWII footage, hoping to get a glimpse of my late father in action. I was so excited to see some scenes of the American military and their jeeps with their girls' names painted on them, hoping to glimpse my dad's Jeep with my mother's name. Sadly, I did not. But our family has a wonderful photo to cherish.

I saw this movie on BBC2 in 1976(?).I was 5 years old at the time and it has stuck in my mind ever since.If anyone out there has a copy I would dearly love to have it in my collection.I will,of course,pay for any conversion,copying and shipping costs.This has been a lifelong quest of mine ,I would dearly love to scratch this one off my "someday Ill find it" list.Until I found this site I thought the war footage was set to actual Beatles recordings.Never realized they were cover versions by different artists.This makes it even more interesting.Is the soundtrack available anywhere?Anyway,my memory may be a little clouded but I would recommend this film to anyone with even a vague interest in either music,history or movies.It is well worth seeing.If anyone can help I would greatly appreciate it.

I saw this oddity once upon a time at one of Toronto's oddest little theatres, The Screening Room, which no longer exists. The room is still there, over the Kingsway Cinema, but it doesn't operate as a theatre anymore.

This would have been in 1979 or 1980, and they were showing a double bill of blasphemous Beatles films, this one and the Bee Gees' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" (1978). We knew the Bee Gees would be an embarrassment, but we had greater hopes for this film. (And the Bee Gees were free if you bought a ticket for the other one, as I recall.)

It was certainly a relief to learn that the Allies won World War II but otherwise... The combination of sacrosanct Beatles tunes and wartime stock footage didn't sound like such a good idea, and when you actually saw it, it turned out to be even more ridiculous than you would have guessed. The only image I still recall 20 years on is one of the "famous" ones, "Get Back" being sung over German tank footage run in reverse. As the philosopher said, "It's a fine line between clever and stupid."

But it was better than the Bee Gees!

Mind-imploding cinematic disaster from Twentieth-Century Fox pairs archival World War II footage and Fox films from (primarily) the same period along with "choice" Beatles covers. It's sort of like THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT! gone terribly wrong. Did people think that this film would have some sort of educational purpose? Maybe a Fox executive thought this would fill in the void for Beatles fans desperate for the band to reunite? Some of the stock footage is quite interesting, like Japanese-American owned businesses disguising their ethnicity and footage of James Stewart enlisting. So too is a look at some of the fictitious films Fox made in response to the war (in one clip, a woman hears news of Pearl Harbor on the radio and says, "Oh, it must be Orson Welles!"). But most of the music is pretty awful, and cuing "The Fool on the Hill" and "Nowhere Man" with Hitler and Mussolini respectively can't take the place of a scholarly exploration of the subject.

I remember when this movie came out, and begging my parents to drive me to the theatre to see it. I willl admit, you have to be a fan of the Beatles and into WW2 history to really get into this movie. I am not lying when I tell you that I'm staring at the album soundtrack right now on my shelf in front of me. I could never figure out why they have never released this movie out on video, being that so many 'stinkers' are thrown on the shelves every year. I will admit, when I went to see it (over 20 years ago), there were few people in the audience at the theatre. But the way that the music is in sync with the film footage was really great, but I'm relying on a twenty year old plus memory of the film.