Paul McCartney wanted the Beatles to star in an anti-Vietnam war film
Paul McCartney wanted the Beatles to star in an anti-Vietnam War film at the height of their fame, a new book has revealed.
Philosopher Bertrand Russell had pleaded with the singer and bass guitarist “to do something positive” with the Fab Four’s global following and make a political movie a year after the band’s second big screen outing Help.
But the secret 1966 film project was shelved after thriller writer Len Deighton failed to convince Sir Paul, now 82, that remaking the First World War musical Oh! What a Lovely War was the right vehicle for his stand against US intervention in South East Asia.
In Deighton’s 1966 script, the Fab Four would have played members of the doomed Smith family, who feature in the musical and unwittingly volunteer for the hell of the trenches. By then the Beatles had made two films, A Hard Day’s Night in 1964 and Help in 1965. So the third film would have been at the height of Beatlemania.
Writing in his new book, With The Beatles, Patrick Humphries reveals the idea was born in the summer of 1966 when McCartney met 94-year-old anti-war activist Russell in London.
“Russell had tried to convince Paul to do something positive with the power the Beatles had by then accrued,” writes Humphries. Soon after, at Russell’s suggestion, Sir Paul contacted Deighton, who had shot to fame the same year as the Beatles with his spy thriller The Ipcress File, filmed with Michael Caine in 1965, and re-imagined by Netflix in 2022.
The writer, now 95, had been desperate to adapt the stage play Oh! What a Lovely War for the big screen and the pair discussed the idea over a curry at the writer’s home in Southwark, south London, in August 1966.
Source: Mark Branagan/express.co.uk
