‘Little Malcolm’: the first time George Harrison made a movie and how it was almost lost forever
While George Harrison is only responsible for a small slice of The Beatles pie – it’s a very big pie – his alternative impact on The Beatles’ creative direction was massive. A different creative voice to the otherwise prolific John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Harrison’s creative legacy was forged on the experimental and obscure. Be it the incorporation of sitar into instrumentation or using syllables on the song’s offbeats, his work brought a point of difference to the band.
At the very heart of Harrison’s work was intrigue. So after the dissolution of The Beatles in 1970, the goalposts in which he could shoot his creativity were arguably much wider.
In the height of ‘Beatlemania’, the four-piece had dipped their toe in the world of cinema but from a purely commercial standpoint. A Hard Day’s Night and Help were just two of several films they made to accompany their similarly named albums. While some of them were critically well-received, it’s hard to argue past the point that they were a cog in The Beatles machine, being driven by the band’s record label, Apple Records.
It’s a creative decision you wouldn’t associate with the more understated Harrison. Instead, his exploration of cinema would be expected to be in the form of arthouse narratives. But this was something that did, in fact, come later, during his first executive producer credit on the 1974 film Little Malcolm. Directed by Stuart Cooper and starring John Hurt in the lead role, it was an adaptation of David Halliwell’s play Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs. Following the story of lead character Malcolm Scrawdyke, a fascist political figure who plots revenge against the college that expelled him by forming a right-wing political movement, the film garnered critical acclaim, winning the prestigious Silver Bear award at the Berlin International Film Festival.
Harrison, who by ‘74 had no reason to pursue commercial success and was instead looking for a passion project, backed the film singlehandedly, such was his faith in it:
“George never said this to me,” says Cooper, “but I definitely got the feeling that Little Malcolm may have been the first and last time George ever went to a play. But he was a big, big fan of it and also a big fan of [its star] Johnny Hurt, so he was in our corner already. Also, at the time, the other Beatles all had a film gig. John had done Imagine, Paul, I guess, directed Magical Mystery Tour, and Ringo was in Candy and The Magic Christian. So, the only one without a film gig was George.”
Adding, “He financed Malcolm through a company called Suba Films, which existed solely to receive profits from the animated Yellow Submarine. It was financed entirely by Yellow Submarine! It wasn’t a big budget, somewhere around a million, million and a half pounds – not expensive. He financed it top to bottom. He stepped up, wrote the cheque, and we made the movie.”
So, with a Beatle financier and a Silver Bear to boot, the film had all the hallmarks of going on to achieve cult status. But in the corporate fallout that followed from the breakup of one of music’s biggest-ever bands, Little Malcolm got caught in the crosshairs: “In the end, we got hung up by The Beatles’ breakup, when all of the Apple and Beatles assets went into the official receiver’s hands. So Little Malcolm just basically sat there for a couple of years. Whatever heat and buzz we generated was all lost. It didn’t diminish the movie, but it stopped the momentum. George had to fight to get it back,” Cooper said.
It was a somewhat muted cinematic release that ultimately mirrored the understated genius of Harrison’s musical contribution. But it wasn’t an experience that deterred Harrison from making further forays into film. The establishment of his production company, Handmade Films, in the 1980s helped deliver British classics like Brian, Withnail & I, and The Long Good Friday to the big screen.
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