Reviews: Act Naturally

Bethany Easton, Lecturer in Project Management, University of Cumbria, reviews the book 'Act Naturally: The Beatles on Film' by Steve Matteo (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2023 ISBN: 9781493059010, 350 pp.). With an impressive and ever-expanding number of films on the Beatles, it is only natural that authors are producing texts that examine this particular element of the group’s history. Steve Matteo delves into this area in Act Naturally: The Beatles on Film, in which he explores the Beatles’ various escapades in the film world, from A Hard Day’s Night (dir. Richard Lester, 1964) to Peter Jackson’s (2021) The Beatles: Get Back. Matteo details his aim from the outset: to offer Beatles fans an engaging but informative text exploring the Beatles on film through a mix of images, description and fact. Each chapter details exact dates, locations and events: "April 7th featured shooting the pub cellar sequence where Ringo is confronted by Raja the Bengal tiger, who turns into a pussycat whenever he hears the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, commonly known as ‘Ode to Joy’. (138)". Although Matteo self-describes as not being ‘a film scholar’ (vi), his work indicates the contrary, as he presents his meticulously researched findings throughout. This level of detail goes beyond solely exploring the Beatles. There is an enormous amount of historical cinematic context that preceded and surrounded the group’s film work, including the ‘new British film wave: realist films, social problem films, and what came to be known as “kitchen sink” films’ (11). As the author notes, ‘This book is as much a celebration of the films of the Beatles, as it is a championing of the British films of the 1960s in general’ (vi)

Rebel Fans: Women and Music Culture in the 1960s

Popular music was integral to the 1960s and to the lives of the many young people who bought records, listened to the radio, went to concerts, joined fan clubs, and forged communities around music. For many young women, music and fandom became terrains of cultural rebellion through the experiences, connection, access to new ideas, and participation in public culture that each provided. When these experiences were lived in public, as they were so visibly at the height of Beatlemania, popular music fandom became a major current in American culture and challenged many gender conventions in families, relationships, dress, behavior, and public spaces. Images of women as fans in the 1960s—from screaming Beatlemaniacs to the ubiquitous “hippie chicks”—are well known in the era’s visual record and the smiling, sometimes frantic, faces of fans and the sound of their screams have been integral to recent commemorations of the decade. While these screams and images are significant, alone they do not reveal the rich stories of connection and meaning that made up sixties music culture and the unique experiences of women’s fandom that were integral to the 1960s. By locating fans as individuals and communities in the folk revival, Beatlemania, and the rock music of the counterculture, this project explores women’s experiences as fans and illustrates the ways in which music and fandom shaped women’s participation in a vibrant music culture and in political culture as well. By taking women’s music fandom seriously as a broad and important cultural impulse, this project explores how it both reflected and shaped many of the decade’s crucial developments and charts connections between music, music fandom, women’s liberation, and the cultural rebellions of the era

Rebel Fans: Women and Music Culture in the 1960s

Popular music was integral to the 1960s and to the lives of the many young people who bought records, listened to the radio, went to concerts, joined fan clubs, and forged communities around music. For many young women, music and fandom became terrains of cultural rebellion through the experiences, connection, access to new ideas, and participation in public culture that each provided. When these experiences were lived in public, as they were so visibly at the height of Beatlemania, popular music fandom became a major current in American culture and challenged many gender conventions in families, relationships, dress, behavior, and public spaces. Images of women as fans in the 1960s—from screaming Beatlemaniacs to the ubiquitous “hippie chicks”—are well known in the era’s visual record and the smiling, sometimes frantic, faces of fans and the sound of their screams have been integral to recent commemorations of the decade. While these screams and images are significant, alone they do not reveal the rich stories of connection and meaning that made up sixties music culture and the unique experiences of women’s fandom that were integral to the 1960s. By locating fans as individuals and communities in the folk revival, Beatlemania, and the rock music of the counterculture, this project explores women’s experiences as fans and illustrates the ways in which music and fandom shaped women’s participation in a vibrant music culture and in political culture as well. By taking women’s music fandom seriously as a broad and important cultural impulse, this project explores how it both reflected and shaped many of the decade’s crucial developments and charts connections between music, music fandom, women’s liberation, and the cultural rebellions of the era