‘Up Against It’: the baffling film about assassinating the Prime Minister that The Beatles almost made
While many musicians have successfully transitioned to the silver screen and demonstrated their acting chops (or lack thereof), The Beatles were one of the first pop groups to do so. While they were riding on the strengths of their success and simply acting as fictionalised versions of themselves in most of their filmography, the Fab Four had many cinematic outings which had varying levels of acclaim.
The comedy capers of Help! and the jukebox musical of A Hard Day’s Night stand tall as two of the more positively viewed Beatles movies, and while the band themselves played little part in the animated adventure of Yellow Submarine, it’s perhaps the best example of a feature film that uses the band’s likenesses.
On the other end of the spectrum, Magical Mystery Tour is perceived by most people to be an incoherent stream-of-consciousness disaster that fails to entertain and endear the audience to the band on multiple levels, while other unofficial Beatles films have received a veritable panning from critics and fans of the band alike. Take, for example, the ill-advised Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band film adaptation starring the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton – the less that’s said about its pathetic attempts to turn a pseudo-conceptual album into a cogent plot, the better.
However, the worst ideas that The Beatles could’ve ended up adding to their film careers were, thankfully, the ones that never saw the light of day. While the existence of plans for a Stanley Kubrick-directed adaptation of Lord of the Rings is often heavily debated among fans, one completely batshit concept that had their name attached to it was certainly close to happening.
Up Against It was the brainchild of controversial playwright Joe Orton, who was hired by Walter Shenson, the producer for The Beatles’ first two film outings, to come up with the next concept for a Beatles flick. Shenson may well have been hoping for some more hijinks akin to his previous work with the band, but the script that Orton submitted was far from a laugh and instead took a dark turn as it relied on shockingly misogynistic tropes and a plot that would be hard for even the most transgressive auteurs to handle delicately.
With the general premise of the film revolving around an alternate universe where women hold all positions of power, you’d think that there would be plenty of room to weave in feminist narratives that painted the band as pro-women, but instead, it took things in the direction of a plot to assassinate the Prime Minister. Not only this, but the band were meant to be dressed in drag throughout the film, participating in a civil war between men and women, and also forming their own polycule at the climax of the film, despite Paul McCartney’s adamant protestations that “weren’t gay and that was really all there was to it.”
It’s remarkable that Orton even considered this a viable premise for The Beatles to put their names to, but their rejection of the idea didn’t mean that it was completely abandoned. Up Against It would eventually be adapted into a musical with contributions from Todd Rundgren and also became a BBC Radio 3 play featuring Prunella Scales as the Prime Minister and Blur frontman Damon Albarn as one of the central characters. At least The Beatles had some sense not to entertain the concept.
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