George Harrison

Looking over one of the wrap ups from the Cannes Film Festival a story caught my eye.  Martin Scorsese attended to promote his new, as yet unfinished documentary, “Living In The Material World: George Harrison”.  Scorsese and Harrison to my mind seem like a perfect combination: the most cinematically inclined of the Beatles examined by the most rock n roll savvy of the great auteurs.

Harrison never pretended to be an actor and often seemed uncomfortable on screen.  He does deliver a couple of  dead-pan one-liners in “A Hard Day’s Night” but is generally overshadowed by John and Ringo.  A later contribution to “The Rutles”, Eric Idle’s Beatles mockumentary reflected his wry sense of humour and affinity with Monty Python.

Harrison believed that the Pythons inherited the anarchic spirit of The Beatles, coming on the British cultural scene just as the musical group was breaking up.  His personal friendship with members of the satirical troupe led to him financing “Life of Brian”.  Its huge success beget in turn HandMade Films, Harrision’s own production company.  Though it made its fair share of duds - including the notorious Madonna/Sean Penn turkey “Shanghai Surprise” - HandMade was also responsible for some of the key, cult releases of the 1980s, including Terry Gilliam’s “Time Bandits”, the gangster films “The Long Good Friday” and “Mona Lisa” and the much loved “Withnail and I”.

Harrison the musician is best showcased in the film version of the first ever charity gig performed by rock artists, “A Concert for Bangladesh”.  The show features material from his masterpiece triple album “All Things Must Pass” as well as choice contributions from Ravi Shankar, Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton and a never better Bob Dylan.  A year after Harrison’s death in 2001 the format was revived by Clapton and many of the same artists in a moving tribute gig to Harrison’s life and work.  “A Concert for George” contains everything from a new spiritual suite by Shankar to the sixty something Pythons - and Tom Hanks - mooning the audience.