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All This and World War II (1976) is a musical documentary. The Beatles' significance was pushed to the breaking point in this bizarre documentary that juxtaposes their songs, sung by a number of rock stars, with World War II newsreel footage and Fox films from the 1940s. It lasted a week in movie theaters and was quickly sent into storage. Evidently, this effort was expended to make an antiwar statement. After Terry Gilliam turned down offer to direct this documentary, 20th Century Fox turned to Susan Winslow. She had previously produced Brother can you Spare a Dime for Phillipe Mora which married 30s newsreel and mostly Warner Bros movie footage to gramophone songs of the period, similar to Pennies From Heaven (All This, n.d.). The movie was made only six years after the Beatles had split up. Its intended audience was the music-goers who were Beatles fans vehemently opposed to contemporary artists daring to improve the original material; however, the actual audience was movie-goers, usually non-Beatle fans less interested in the past than the new rock and pop of the 1970s. Nevertheless, the twenty-year gap separating these two key periods of history has shrunken enough that, when viewed from the 21st century, All This and World War II actually seems to work. This is because its nostalgia level is twofold: working both with images of the War (the 40s) and the music of the Beatles (the 60s). Just like any other cult movie, it had to be made, fail utterly, and be revived again 30 years later before it could be appreciated and understood (Burridge, 2005). The film is made up of archival news footage, so its only the music that bears the brunt of the criticism. The selection of artists is peculiar and obviously designed to cash in on who was hot in the mid 70s. What followed was such a bizarre and strangely compelling visual and aural collision that it seemed so ambitious and ugly that it worked (All This, n.d.).
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