4 Ringo Starr Movies to Avoid: ‘Relentless, Crawling, Bloody Lack of Talent’
Of all The Beatles, Ringo Starr was the most successful in his movie career. Each acted with the band and appeared in films afterward, but Starr has the most extensive filmography. Critics agree that he showed promise as an actor; he was natural and charming onscreen and could have had a successful career. Unfortunately, he wasn’t very selective in the films he agreed to appear in, which negatively impacted his career. Here are four of Starr’s films to avoid.
‘Give My Regards to Broad Street’ is 1 of the movies Ringo Starr appeared in with another Beatle
Starr agreed to appear in the 1984 film Give My Regards to Broad Street because his former bandmate Paul McCartney wrote it.
“Ringo and I are good friends,” McCartney said, per the book Ringo: With a Little Help by Michael Seth Starr. “After all The Beatles’ years, and all the troubles of the break-up, we find it easy to get along. I saw him one night socially and I was very excited. I said, ‘I’m gonna do this film and I’m gonna get you involved. Will you do it with me?’ For some reason, he got the idea it was like a Beatles film. Well, we’d had a few drinks.”
Starr received praise for his role, but the film itself was a critical and financial disaster. Critics described it as tedious, meandering, and utterly skippable. Anyone intrigued by the idea of seeing McCartney and Starr on screen together would be better suited watching A Hard Day’s Night.
‘Son of Dracula’ struggled to even get a theatrical release
In 1974, Starr portrayed the wizard Merlin in Son of Dracula. The musical comedy starred musicians such as Harry Nilsson, Keith Moon, John Bonham, and Peter Frampton. Unfortunately, all these big names were not enough to improve the quality of the film.
They struggled to find a distributor for the film, and when it finally hit theaters, it did so to little fanfare.
“We had the premiere in Atlanta, the first movie since Gone With the Wind to open there, and we had 12,000 kids screaming, we had bands,” Starr said, per Ultimate Classic Rock. “But we left town the next day, and so did everyone else. In America, the movie only played in towns that had one cinema, because if it had two, no matter what was on down the road, they’d all go there!”
Starr jokingly admitted that the film was not a work of art by any means.
“It is not the best film ever made, but I’ve seen worse,” he reportedly said.
‘Caveman’ was 1 of Ringo Starr’s silliest movies
In 1981, Starr played the title role in Caveman, a prehistoric slapstick comedy. In fairness, the film can be described as fun, but it wasn’t particularly creative or interesting. Ray Connolly, who wrote That’ll Be the Day, one of Starr’s better films, winced at the drummer’s decision to appear in it.
“I felt he threw some of his career away by doing silly things like Caveman,” Connolly said. “He had these lovely soulful eyes. I always thought that. And he could tell you an awful lot with his eyes, which he did very well in A Hard Day’s Night. Maybe he couldn’t read a good script.”
The film’s redeeming quality is that Starr met his longtime wife, Barbara Bach, on set.
‘Candy’ was a poorly reviewed film with little screen time for the drummer
In 1968, Starr appeared in the film Candy in which he plays, regrettably, a Mexican gardener. It was a sex farce with an impressive cast; besides Starr, the film featured Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, Walter Matthau, and John Huston. Starr was excited to work with such an impressive cast, but critics ripped the film to shreds.
“The movie, directed by Christian Marquand, manages to compromise, by its relentless, crawling, bloody lack of talent, almost anyone who had anything to do with it,” Renata Adler wrote for The New York Times. “Richard Burton, as a poet-seducer, gives a firm, delighted, irrefutable demonstration of his lack of any comic talent whatsoever. John Huston and Ringo Starr look as though they had been drawn in by a regrettable, humorless beautiful people syndrome.”
Even for Starr’s biggest, most dedicated fans, the film is not worth watching. Altogether, he is on screen for less than four minutes. Besides, he has better films worth checking out.
