Give My Regards to Broad Street

Give My Regards to Broad Street (1984)

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Source: JustWatch

A former Beatle once spent a fortune of his own money making a movie about losing a tape.

GIVE MY REGARDS TO BROAD STREET (1984) stars Paul McCartney as a version of himself, a musician racing against a 24 hour deadline to find a missing master tape before he loses his recording company to a shady businessman named Rath. The plot, such as it is, serves as a loose frame for a string of musical numbers and re-recorded Beatles and Wings songs.

Peter Webb directs from a script written by Paul McCartney. Bryan Brown plays Steve, tangled up in the mystery, while Ringo Starr and Linda McCartney appear as themselves. Ralph Richardson turns up in one of his final screen roles, and Tracey Ullman gets an early film credit as Sandra.

It flopped on release, but the soundtrack outlived the movie, and the film remains a strange time capsule of McCartney in the mid 1980s.

Physical media

Blu-ray

DVD20th Century FoxRegion 12004UPC 024543113706

VHSCBS/FOX VideoUnited Kingdom1985

LaserDisc

About the film

Six million dollars says they won't find Harry by midnight.

Directed by
Peter Webb
Runtime
109 minutes
Released
November 28, 1984
Certification
PG
Country
United Kingdom
Starring
Paul McCartney, Bryan Brown, Ringo Starr, Barbara Bach, Linda McCartney
More credits
Genres
Drama, Music, Mystery
Language
English
Origin
GB
Studios
MPL Communications
Written by
Paul McCartney
Produced by
Andros Epaminondas, Peter Manley, Linda McCartney, Paul McCartney
Cinematography
Ian McMillan
Music
Paul McCartney
Also starring
Tracey Ullman, Ralph Richardson, John Burgess, Ian Hastings, Philip Jackson

This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.

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Comments

    1. but strangely he is great and very funny in his music videos . Sir Laurence Olivier would have had trouble making this script come alive but Paul is really wooden in the film self conscious as if someone told him “don’t act like you are having fun”

  1. The movie was terrible it flopped it’s opening weekend and had the quickest release on VHS that I could recall and back in the ’80s. It was basically the fall of his recording career as far as the chart success.

  2. I quite like it. In terms of being a great piece of cinema… No, it’s not. But if you look at it as being a collection of music videos, with a loose connecting story, it works and is a bit of fun. It helps if you’re already a McCartney fan to begin with.

  3. Godawful. The ending is an insult to the viewers intelligence. Macca is a great songwriter, but this and MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR demonstrated he likes to see himself in front of the camera but had absolutely no talent for filmmaking.

  4. A terrible movie and Paul’s least best album of his career. But for the classic McCartney track, No More Lonely Nights (which is a diamond in this particular rough) the whole thing can generously be described as ill advised and absolutely forgettable.

  5. He didn’t spend a fortune and it turned out great Why would anyone see it if they weren’t a McCartney fan? Answer…….to slag it off! That’s just what critics do! The music was amazing and so werethe scenes that accompanied it. I’ve certainly seen a lot worse of a story line and the moral of the story was plain to see.

  6. George pointed out in the Anthology documentary that he had a great production company at the time and was a seasoned and very successful film producer. It might have turned out much better if Paul had been willing to collaborate with him and ask for help.

    1. Edward And there you have, in a nutshell, the complicated (to say the least) relationship, with regard to creative matters, between George and Paul.
      Always the grudging, arms-length, big brother / kid brother dynamic.

    2. Edward Shuttleworth Good point. He should have done that. Could have made a much better picture. On budget and injoyable. Paul’s my favorite it’s just..Sir Paul and John seemed to be dismissive of George. There’s a scene in the Peter Jackson Get Back when John and Paul are jaming together and George trys to join in and they just blow him off .it’s as if in there eyes…”he’s just little George”. You know

      1. Peter Pendergast Dismissive is a understatement George was just as good as Paul or John but he never had anyone (from what I gather) to bounce his ideas off of like John or Paul did (maybe Clapton) I feel George can hang with both of them! IMO… just me getting a little pissed just thinking how Lennon and McCartney treated him…😠😖😡

  7. I was 16 when this came out and I asked my mom if she’d take me to see it. She said we could go next week. By the time next week came, it wasn’t playing anymore! It was years before I saw it. The soundtrack is good, but the movie kind of plods along.

  8. Obviously not an Oscar caliber film. Paul even admitted the mistakes he made especially regarding the script. He said there should have been multiple drafts or at least an experienced script writer. I enjoy the film for what it is and I like to feast my eyes on Paul. He was gorgeous.

  9. This was not long after losing John. We were starving for anything Beatles. The music is so wonderful how could anyone not see the real beauty in this? I loved it and have the DVD which comes out every fall.

  10. Just think of it like a very long music video about Paul McCartney and the Beatles music featuring Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr and Linda McCartney. It’s a boring movie but the music in it, is great

  11. If you hear Little Lamb Dragonfly as Paul grieving the distance between himself and John, No More Lonely Nights can feel like a second chapter. In the first song, the lonely nights go on and on; in the second, Paul sings “no more lonely nights.” The earlier song sounds like a wish for John to come back, while the later one sounds like a promise that the loneliness will end. It’s a moving connection between the two songs, even if Paul didn’t intend them as a pair.

  12. I wonder whether it’s on a list of forbidden subjects because I’ve never heard a journalist ask him about it. And he never plays No More Lonely Nights.
    When you think about it, his chart placings were never the same after it.
    You can’t really talk of something ‘ending’ Paul McCartney, but Broad Street came close

  13. Not everything has to be Citizen Kane. A light watch with great music featuring two of the Beatles. Enjoy it on its simplest level.

    Oh, and the great songs that get no airplay and no discussion— Not Such A Bad Boy and No Values….. If they were done as Wings songs we’d be still hearing them all the time!

  14. Unlike Mystery Tour, which has over the years gotten some positive feedback for being a for runner of the music video,and serialism, I don’t think I can point to any diamond in the rough.the music of course shines.

  15. IMHO George Martin and Paul bit off more than they could chew. Writing and performing and making the decision to record live resulted, in my opinion, some very stale and sterile cover versions of his own material. The entirely new material sounds much better (and two of tracks recorded live almost sounding like a jam). Not an album I listen to, apart from the new songs.

  16. A friend of mine dragged me to see the godawful Rick Springfield movie “Hard to Hold” which was simply horrendous from beginning to end. I later took him to see “Broad Street” and he said “Okay – NOW we’re even.” lol 😉

  17. Allen Klein -was like the Greg Allman character “I’m No Angel”. Sure , he had some shady dealings but his overall impact was hugely positive. Red/Blue albums (his vision) turned Beatles from “old HUGE band” into enduring phenomenon. It launched second wave of Beatles fans (and more since)

  18. While no masterpiece, I enjoyed this movie a great deal but I have always theorized that it was because I heard him talk about it in an interview, where he said that people had always asked him to make a ‘day in the life’ film, to which I always responded with a jovial laughing comment about how his life wasn’t very interesting at that point. So instead he decided to make a movie about what he imagined the average fan thought his life was like. I went straight to the theater and saw it. Laughed my a$$ off the whole time because I was in on the joke. The problem here was that MPL (an indo record label, for Paul’s music at the time) knew nothing about promoting a movie.

  19. There are memorable and worthwhile parts of the film which I remember and seek out while rewatching, including Paul as a busker doing a jazzed up version of Yesterday in front of the Broad St Station. Also the Victorian dream sequences. Tracy Ullman debut. RINGO is always a benefit to this film. Albert Hall performances. Many great scenes but wasn’t pulled together as much as some critics thought it should. Reminds me of the Magical Mystery Tour critics. They are forgotten but Paul’s films endure, warts and all.