Help!

By Frank Rich

ALL YOU NEED IS CASH NBC, March 22

All You Need Is Cash, a frantic spoof of Beatlemania, is 90 minutes long and has about three genuine laughs. By the prevailing standards of network comedy specials, like Mary Tyler Moore's recent hour on CBS, three laughs are nothing to scoff at. But this show promised so much more. The producer is Lome Michaels, the guiding spirit of NBC's feisty Saturday Night Live. The writer and co-director (with Gary Weis) is Eric Idle, of Monty Python's Flying Circus. The show's cast includes Mick and Bianca Jagger, George Harrison, Paul Simon and four out of seven of the "Not Ready for Prime Time Players." With a crowd like this and a subject like the Beatles, one expects to be dazzled, but All You Need Is Cash is an invitation to take a nap. No wonder the show airs on NBC, the network that is American television's answer to Waterloo.

All You Need Is Cash is a mock documentary that follows a legendary rock group called the Rutles from obscurity in Liverpool to international fame. Most of its events are overly familiar. Like the Beatles, the Rutles play Hamburg and the Ed Sullivan show; they revolutionize rock with an album called Sgt. Rutter's Dart Club Band; they receive M.B.E.s from the Queen and fall under the spell of a guru.

But where, oh where, are the jokes? Is it funny that the Rutles' first big hit song is called Hold My Hand instead of I Want to Hold Your Hand? Or that their largest American concert is held at New York's Che Stadium, not Shea Stadium? Is it a howl that John and Yoko (here named Ron and Chastity) hold their famous antiwar press conference in a bathtub rather than a bed? This is not humor; it's just British undergraduate silliness.

Perhaps some of the gags would be more palatable if All You Need Is Cash had a satirical point of view or at least a healthy nasty streak. It does not.

Idle's dialogue and Neil Innes' song parodies are full of idle wordplay and bereft of sting. Much of the time Idle does not even seem particularly interested in satirizing the Beatles or their fans; he launches instead into banal gibes aimed at documentary film makers. As satirical targets go, documentary film makers are only slightly more hilarious than, say, stamp collectors or locksmiths.

The few laughs that can be found in All You Need Is Cash are visual. Idle and Weis have reshot sequences from Richard Lester's mod Beatles films (now called A Hard Day's Rut and Ouch!) to poke wicked fun at their most faddish excesses; similar pranks have been pulled on the psychedelic animation of Yellow Submarine. Unfortunately, the show's creators have not lavished nearly so much care on their casting. The four Rutles (Idle, Innes, John Halsey, Rikki Fataar) are virtually indistinguishable, and their performances are morbidly charmless.

These guys not only fail to capture the frisky spirit of the Beatles; they almost succeed in making one nostalgic for the Monkees.

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