#13 Pop Gear

January 13, 2021
Pop Gear (1965) **
Kanopy
Free
Wildcard

Again, and I know this is just the same old refrain, I was tired, it was late, I could not find anything I wanted to watch. I started watching a couple of things for a few minutes but just turned them off. I was really at a loss. And when you just keep scrolling and scrolling and then an hour goes by, that doesn’t help!

I finally chose this music compilation, Pop Gear, (Go Go Mania for US release), from Kanopy. It is a weird little film, performances by British Invasion groups of their songs from 1964 and 1965.

It starts and ends with footage of the Beatles, singing and playing live for an audience of screaming teens, and that is the best part of the film. The rest of it is made up not of live performances, but of mostly dudes in matching suits, mostly wandering around in a desultory manner, lip syncing. That’s not mostly, that’s entirely.

The first half are the songs from ’64, introduced by a host, then he leaves, and the ’65 songs are just a mystery, though there are some interesting sets and a couple of dance numbers to make up for it.

The host is this super creepy guy, very peculiar-looking, and I looked him up to see what his deal is, and it was Jimmy Saville. Now, I didn’t know what he looked like, but I definitely had heard of him. He was a very popular presenter on the BBC for many decades, and then he died, and then it came out that he was a hugely monstrous sex predator and rapist, worse than Cosby, worse than Harvey Weinstein, worse than you could even imagine. So that kind of put a pall on the movie.

Here’s the thing, though. I literally took one look at him and thought, wow, what a total creep! You get a very weird vibe off of him back in 1964, so I have no idea at all as to how nobody guessed, he practically has “I will rape you in a hospital” tattooed on his forehead.

So yeah. The Beatles footage is great, the rest is an interesting historical record, Jimmy Saville makes it kind of weird to watch, whether you do know about him or you don’t.