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‘Wonderwall’: The ultimate psychedelic Sixties flick?
09.20.2013
04:30 pm
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Wonderwall is an unusual and beautiful psychedelic Sixties period piece that sees a scientist (Jack MacGowran) becoming smitten by a beautiful model who lives next door to him.

She is played by the ever so gorgeous Jane Birkin...


 
Wonderwall is probably the ultimate “swinging London” film and what a pedigree it has. The featured Anita Pallenberg and Dutch design collective The Fool (who art-directed the film and were well-known for their work with The Beatles) in cameo roles. The film’s two primary sets (the apartments of the scientist and the model) were designed by Assheton Gorton who’d been previously nominated for a BAFTA for his work on Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup (another film in contention for “most Sixties film.”)

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The soundtrack was by George Harrison and featured Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, some top classical Indian players in Bombay and an uncredited banjo performance by Monkee Peter Tork. There is one song called “Ski-Ing” that features one of the single most ferocious guitar riffs that Eric Clapton ever laid down and most of his biggest fans have never even heard of it.


 
Made in 1968 by first time director Joe Massot (who would later direct the Led Zeppelin concert film The Song Remains the Same and worked on the psychedelic western Zachariah with the Firesign Theatre), Wonderwall was released on DVD in an elaborate package by Rhino in 2004 that now goes for top dollar to collectors.

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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09.20.2013
04:30 pm
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Reflections on Love: Swinging Sixties Pop Candy

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Looking like an advert for Swinging London, Joe Massot’s 1965 short Reflections on Love mixes pop documentary with scenes devised by writer Derek Marlowe and (apparently) an uncredited, Larry Kramer. Though everything looks rather beautiful, it is such a terribly straight film, and considering the talent involved, and doesn’t really offer much love for the audience to reflect on. Then, this was the Sixties, when everything was new and exciting, and getting hitched in a registry office was daring and rad. O, how innocent it all seems. Massot went on to direct George Harrison’s Wonderwall and later, Led Zeppelin’s concert film The Song Remains the Same. Kramer went on to script Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1967), and Ken Russell’s Women in Love (1969), before writing his novel Faggots in 1978. As for Marlowe, he wrote the classic double-agent spy thriller, A Dandy in Aspic, and followed this up with a series of idiosyncratic and stylish novels (from crime to Voodoo to Lord Byron), which are all shamefully out-of-print, and not even available as e-books - publishers please note.

The original version was twenty-one minutes long, and this is the revamped, re-scored (by Kula Shaker), re-edited (12 minutes) re-release from 1999, and still watchable pop-candy.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

A Dandy in Aspic: A letter form Derek Marlowe


Wonderwall: The Ultimate Sixties Flick?


Wonderwall Music: George Harrison’s little-known 1968 solo album


 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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02.04.2012
06:41 pm
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