Paul McCartney’s 1984 feature film Give My Regards To Broad Street is regarded in the category as being one of the former Beatle’s few missteps over the years. But it did lead to a glorious soundtrack, including his wonderous collaboration with Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour on ‘No More Lonely Nights’.
The film centres around a fictional day in the life of McCartney, who wrote the film for the screen with himself, Ringo Starr and Linda McCartney all appearing as themselves. The film was nothing short of a disaster commercially, only managing to recoup $1.4 million from it’s $9 million budget however the soundtrack album which accompanied Give My Regards to Broad Street made up for the film’s shortcomings.
McCartney’s passion project was also less than well-received by critics at the time who universally panned the film, with Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times giving it one out of four stars, praising its music as “wonderful” but said it “is about as close as you can get to a nonmovie, and the parts that do try something are the worst.”
He labelled the film’s long dream sequences as irrelevant and criticised it’s photography, advising readers to buy the soundtrack album rather than going to the effort to watch the film.
IMDB describes the somewhat nonsensical feature film as “Sir Paul McCartney plays himself in another exaggerated “Day In the Life”. Included are fictional scenes of the star preparing to film two videos, rehearsing in a loft, playing for the BBC, and even dreaming up a rather horrific nightmare. A loosely developed plot about missing master tapes ties all of these events together.”
