The Beatles’ breaking of America – that mythic, ecstatic moment which restored Britain’s postwar pride and became an enduring cornerstone of our soft power self-respect – is the subject of this absorbing documentary from director David Tedeschi; Martin Scorsese is a producer and interviews Ringo himself in the present day, with Paul speaking to camera separately. It also uses the intimate hotel-room and backstage footage shot at the time by the Maysles brothers, Albert and David.
The film is a record of the band’s arrival in New York in 1964, and their legendary live appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, the host resembling a wary, jowly Richard Nixon. Craig Brown’s book One Two Three Four points out that the Beatles’ appearance on the show followed an interminable succession of forgotten support acts who, though they may have eagerly accepted the TV booking at the time, were doomed to be hated by an impatient nation for not being the Beatles, for ever tainted by their sheer irrelevance. This film shows one of the TV audience yawning at one of these lesser mortals.
