The Great Movies IV

Roger Ebert

• Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780226404035
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Essays from the influential and beloved film critic: "No one has done as much as Ebert to connect the creators of movies with their consumers."—Richard Corliss, Time Over more than four decades, Roger Ebert built a reputation writing reviews for the Chicago Sun-Times and, later, arguing onscreen with rival Chicago Tribune critic Gene Siskel, and later Richard Roeper, about the movies they loved and loathed. But Ebert's wisdom went well beyond a mere thumbs up or thumbs down. The Great Movies IV is the fourth and final collection of Roger Ebert's essays, comprising sixty-two reviews of films ranging from the silent era to the recent past. From films like The Cabinet of Caligari and Viridiana that have been considered canonical for decades, to movies only recently recognized as masterpieces, to Superman, The Big Lebowski, and Pink Floyd: The Wall, the pieces gathered here demonstrate the critical acumen seen in Ebert's daily reviews and the more reflective and wide-ranging considerations that the longer format allowed him to offer. Also included are an insightful foreword by film critic Matt Zoller Seitz, editor-in-chief of the official Roger Ebert website, and a touching introduction by Chaz Ebert. A fitting capstone to a truly remarkable career, The Great Movies IV will introduce newcomers to some of the most exceptional movies ever made, while revealing new insights to connoisseurs.

Yellow Submarine

Once upon a time, or maybe twice, there was a land called Pepperland. Eighty thousand leagues beneath the sea it lay, or lie (I’m not too sure).

Yellow Submarine was released in 1968, after the Summer of Love but before Woodstock, when the Beatles stood astride the world of pop music, and “psychedelic art” had such an influence that people actually read underground newspapers printed in orange on yellow paper. That was the year 2001: A Space Odyssey was released in reserved-ticket engagements with an intermission, and hippies would mingle with the ticket holders on the sidewalk outside the theater, and sneak back into the theater for the film’s second half, to lay, or lie, flat on their backs on the floor in front of the screen, observing Kubrick’s time-space journey from a skewed perspective—while, as the saying went, they were stoned out of their gourds.

Yellow Submarine was also embraced as a “head movie,” leading to an observation attributed to Ken Kesey: “They say it looks better when you’re stoned. But that’s true of all movies.” All of that was many, many years ago, and now here is a restored version of Yellow Submarine, arriving like a time capsule from the flower power era, with a graphic look that fuses Peter Max, Rene Magritte, and M. C. Escher. To borrow another useful cliché from the 1960s, it blossoms like eye candy on the screen, and with 11 songs by the Beatles, it certainly has the best music track of any animated film.

The story begins at a moment of crisis in Pepperland, which is invaded by the music-hating Blue Meanies. They hate the power of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which has inspired a big YES to sprout near the bandstand, not to mention a towering LOVE and all sorts of bright and cheerful decorations. So the Meanies freeze everything with blue bombs that bleach out the colors and leave Pepperland in a state of blue-gray suspended animation. Old Fred, conductor of the band, escapes the Meanie treatment and flees in the Yellow Submarine to enlist the help of the Beatles.

This is a story that appeals even to young children, but it also has a knowing, funny style that adds an undertow of sophistication. The narration and dialogue are credited to four writers (including Love Story’s Erich Segal), and yet the overall tone is the one struck by John Lennon in his books In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works. Puns, drolleries, whimsies, and asides meander through the sentences:

There’s a cyclops! He’s got two eyes. Must be a bicyclops. It’s a whole bicloplopedia!

The animation, directed by Tom Halley from Heinz Edelmann’s designs, isn’t full motion and usually remains within one plane, but there’s nothing stiff or limited about it; it has a freedom of color and invention that never tires, and it takes a delight in visual paradoxes. Consider for example the Beatles’s visit to the Sea of Holes, a complex Escherian landscape of oval black holes that seem to open up, or down, or sideways, so that the Beatles can enter and emerge in various dimensions.

(Ringo keeps one of the holes, and later gets them out of a tricky situation by remembering, “I’ve got a hole in my pocket!”)

Such dimensional illusions run all through the film. My favorite is a vacuum-nosed creature that snarfs up everything it can find to inhale. Finally it starts on the very frame itself, snuffling it all up into its nose, so that it stands forlorn on a black screen. A pause, and then the creature’s attention focuses on its own tail. It attacks that with the vacuum nose and succeeds in inhaling itself, after which nothing at all is left.

The film’s visuals borrow from the mind bank of the twentieth century. Consider a visit to a sort of image repository where we find Buffalo Bill, Marilyn Monroe, the Phantom, Mandrake the Magician, and Frankenstein (who, awakened, turns out to be John Lennon). Dozens of images cascade out of the doors in a long corridor, including Magritte’s big green apple and his pipe. And real-life photography is built into other sequences, including the one for “Eleanor Rigby.”

The songs of course are the backbone of the movie, and they include “Yellow Submarine,” “Eleanor Rigby,” “All Together Now,” “Nowhere Man,” “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” “All You Need Is Love,” and (in a live-action coda) the Beatles in person wisecracking and singing “All Together Now.” The movie’s original soundtrack was monaural, and it sounds a little muddy on my rare laserdisc of the film. The restored version, in six-track digital stereo, remastered at the legendary Abbey Ro...