Synopsis
A small town band makes it big, but loses track of their roots, as they get caught up into the big-time machinations of the music biz. Now, they must thwart a plot to destroy their home town. Built around the music of The Beatles, this musical uses some big name groups like Peter Frampton and Aerosmith.
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Cast
- Peter FramptonBilly Shears
- Barry GibbMark Henderson
- Robin GibbDave Henderson
- Maurice GibbBob Henderson
- Frankie HowerdMean Mr. Mustard
- Paul NicholasDougie Shears
- Donald PleasenceB.D. Brockhurst
- Sandy FarinaStrawberry Fields
- Dianne SteinbergLucy
- Steve MartinDr. Maxwell Edison
Recommendations
- 70
Film Threat
The 1978 film musical Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is a mess…but it is a wonderfully fascinating mess, a mother lode of undiluted insanity. - 60
Newsweek
Shorn of its inside references, it's a very mixed bag - pleasant but overlong, funny when Steve Martin is on hand and stultifying when Frankie Howerd goes into his Mean Mr. Mustard routines, full of wonderful music that too rarely reaches the boiling point and pathos that sinks to bathos. [31 Jul 1978, p.42] - 40
The New York Times
The movie may have been conceived in a spirit of merriment, but watching it feels like playing shuffleboard at the absolute insistence of a bossy shipboard social director. When whimsy gets to be this overbearing, it simply isn't whimsy any more. - 40
Washington Post
The music isn't bad, but there's something more than a little blasphemous about hearing She's Leaving Home or A Day in the Life sung by the likes of the Bee Gees. - 33
The A.V. Club
Like The Star Wars Christmas Special, Sgt. Pepper puts a beloved, ubiquitous cultural institution in a new context so staggeringly, mind-bogglingly inappropriate that it engenders an intense, almost unbearable level of cognitive dissonance. - 30
Variety
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band will attract some grown-up flower children of the 1960s who will soon find the Michael Schultz film to be a totally bubblegum and cotton candy melange of garish fantasy and narcissism. - 20
Time Out
This crass moral pantomime is plain embarrassing. - 12
Chicago Reader
Indescribably awful—a serving up of Beatles tunes by Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees with the ugliest visuals imaginable, directed with more glitz than good sense by Michael Schultz.
