FILM; When They Were the Fab Five (original) (raw)
Movies|FILM; When They Were the Fab Five
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/04/10/movies/film-when-they-were-the-fab-five.html
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FILM
- April 10, 1994
Credit...The New York Times Archives
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April 10, 1994
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Section 2, Page
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AS ANYONE WHOSE MEMORY stretches back to 1964 can attest, there were dozens of Fifth Beatles. Every other American disk jockey who posed for a photo with the Fab Four laid claim to the title, which was also conferred, more legitimately, on George Martin, the group's brilliant record producer, and on Brian Epstein, the businessman who found them performing in a Liverpool cellar and turned them into international icons.
But in 1960 the band was a quintet, and there actually was a Fifth Beatle. "Backbeat," a film written and directed by Ian Softley, examines the group's quintet days (without benefit of any of the Beatles' own music but with 1950's hits played by members of Nirvana and R.E.M., among others) and draws a portrait of Stu Sutcliffe (played by Stephen Dorff), whose Fifth Beatleness is beyond challenge.
Sutcliffe, a dark-haired James Dean figure in omnipresent dark glasses, was an art-school friend and roommate of John Lennon's. And although his real talent was in Abstract Expressionist painting, not music, Lennon persuaded him to buy a bass guitar and join the band.
This says something about the 1960 Beatles. Lennon had been writing songs with Paul McCartney for two years, and Mr. McCartney had brought in George Harrison, a young guitar hotshot. All three were determined to make it as musicians, but for Lennon the band was also a gang and he was the leader. So it was not unthinkable for him to bring in Sutcliffe on the basis of friendship, not musicianship.
Sutcliffe did not last long. During the Beatles' 1960 Hamburg stint (they returned in 1961 and 1962), he fell in love with Astrid Kirchherr, a young German photographer whose portraits of the early Beatles are now classics. When the Beatles returned to Liverpool, Sutcliffe remained with Astrid and resumed his art studies. He died of a brain hemorrhage at 21, on April 10, 1962, just a few months before the first rumblings of Beatlemania.
The Beatles did not forget him: a photo of Sutcliffe is on the cover of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," in the third row, at the far left. And he is about to have his moment in the sun. Besides "Backbeat," which opens on Friday, an exhibition of 40 of his violently expressive paintings opens at the Govinda Gallery in Washington on May 5.
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