Lasse Hallström – ABBA: The Movie (1977)

ABBA: The Movie is a 1977 film about the pop group ABBA’s Australian tour. It was directed by Lasse Hallström, who directed most of the group’s videos. The film has become a cult film among ABBA fans. Its release coincided with the release of ABBA: The Album, the group’s fifth studio album, and features many songs from that album as well as many of their earlier hits, and one, “Get on the Carousel”, unavailable anywhere else.

Plot
The film has a very thin plot which is no more than a vehicle to link together the concert footage. It concerns the adventures of Ashley Wallace (Robert Hughes), a naïve DJ on Radio 2TW, who normally presents a through-the-night country and western-themed show. In spite of this, he is sent by the station’s boss (Bruce Barry) to get an in-depth interview (“Not an interview, a dialogue”, demands his boss) with the group, whose fame and stature neither he nor Ashley have the first clue about, which is to be aired on the day ABBA leave Australia. Needless to say, Ashley, who has never done an interview before, singularly fails, mainly because he has forgotten to pack his press card, although the fact that he is unable to buy a ticket doesn’t help matters either. Armed with his trusty reel-to-reel tape recorder, Ashley is forced to follow the group all over Australia, beginning in Sydney, and then travelling, in order, to Perth, Adelaide, and Melbourne, experiencing repeated run-ins with the group’s very protective bodyguard (Tom Oliver), as well as his increasingly exasperated boss. Throughout the movie, we see Ashley interviewing members of the public, asking them if and why they like ABBA- most comments are positive.

Eventually, Ashley has an unbelievably lucky chance encounter with Stig Anderson, the group’s manager, who agrees to arrange an interview, and gives him tickets to that evening’s concert. But Ashley sleeps in and misses the appointed interview time. Just as Ashley is about to give up (by this time, he doesn’t even care that his press card has finally arrived), he steps into an elevator and finds himself face-to-face with ABBA. They agree to give him an interview, and he leaves Melbourne just in time to meet the deadline for the radio show to go out on-air. He puts together the final edit in the back of a taxi on the way back from the airport, as ABBA depart Australia for Europe. With only minutes to go, Ashley makes it back to the radio station where, having set the tape up on the studio’s playback machine, he relaxes at his control desk to listen as the interview—which he worked so long and hard to obtain—is broadcast over the airwaves Down Under.

Hallström indicated that the film’s script and plot concept was “conceived on the plane on the way to Australia”.

Initially, 16 mm film was to be used but producers upgraded the project to 35 mm Panavision technology. Mostly filmed in Australia some additional scenes were filmed in ABBA’s native Sweden (but still set in Australia) – noticeably different from Australia are the street signs and the traffic flowing on the right-hand side.- from Wikipedia

Featured songs
“Tiger”
“S.O.S.”
“Money, Money, Money”
“He Is Your Brother”
“Intermezzo No.1”
“Waterloo”
“Mamma Mia”
“Rock Me”
“I’ve Been Waiting for You”
“The Name of the Game”
“Why Did It Have to Be Me?”
“When I Kissed the Teacher”
“Get on the Carousel”
“I’m a Marionette”
“Fernando”
“Dancing Queen”
“So Long”
“Eagle”
“Thank You for the Music”
– from Wikipedia

ABBA The Movie 1977 1080p DTS multisub HighCode-PHD.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1h 35mn
Size: 	4.30 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1920x832 ~> 1955x832
Aspect ratio:  	2.35:1
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	5 700 Kbps
BPP: 	0.149
Audio
#1:  	English 5.1ch DTS @ 755 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/F74F3442392FEF2/ABBA.The.Movie.1977.720p.BluRay.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English, Arabic, Bulgarian, Czech, Dutch, Estonian, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish