Do we really need another Beatles film?
Yes we do!
In fact there’s supposedly a slew of Beatles films coming our way, including Sam Mendes’ sprawling set of four biopics about the individual members, starting with Barry Keoghan playing Ringo Starr.
That comes later, but now we have this new Disney+ documentary. But what else is there to tell?
The Beatles’ taking of America was pretty much covered comprehensively in Ron Howard’s on tour documentary Eight Days A Week. Put simply, all the old footage that there is has already been seen in the countless other documentaries, most notably The Beatles Anthology.
The Beatles ‘64 looks simply at the arrival of the Fab Four in America. Taking in their famous first press conference at JFK Airport (Reporter: “Why does [your music] excite people so much?” Lennon: “If we knew, we’d form another group and become managers.”), the landmark appearance on the Ed Sullivan show and the visible explosion of Beatlemania in the States.
Again, we’ve seen it all before and yet, this does manage the feat of feeling both fresh and timely.
“My sister put the radio on and we heard She Loves You,” says the writer Joe Queenan, bursting into tears on camera, “Everything was dark and then the lights came on.”
Which is really what the film is about.
Produced by Martin Scorsese (who pops up to interview Ringo) and directed by David Tedeschi (Scorsese’s editor on his recent documentaries, including the Dylan Rolling Thunder one), this approach is to show the incredible timing of The Beatles’ arrival in America and what exactly they and their music meant to people.
The documentary begins by showing John F. Kennedy in all his progressive glory, his civil rights and Space Race policies, the youth and hope he brought, before fading to black for a gunshot sound, as we then see a nation in mourning. National trauma very much had the country on its knees.
Cue...The Beatles!
Who, when they landed in February 1964, a mere three months after the JFK assassination, really did inject new hope and optimism into the country, just as they had already done across Europe.
The approach is to combine extended footage from the scenes around New York when they first arrive, seemingly everything David and Albert Maysles shot on that tour, along with contemporary talking heads with Paul and Ringo, and some post-Beatlemania interviews with George and John.
The real joy comes from interviews with eyewitnesses and fans, trying to pinpoint was exactly was the need inside them to scream at their concerts and try to break into the Plaza hotel where the band were staying.
The old footage is very cinema verite, very Scorsese’s beloved Italian neo-realism, and it still thrills to this day, acting as both a behind-the-scenes expose of the hysteria while also capturing why The Beatles themselves provoked it, seemingly without effort.
It was their approachability, thar they weren’t as sexually aggressive as Elvis, how funny they were, just cute madcap things who nevertheless shook their heads and screamed like Little Richard. They were the Marx Brothers of rock n roll and it was leapt upon by a generation of kids who, as they tell it, lived in black and white until that point.
The parents were resistant, indeed we see a lot of the initial hostility directed at them by newspapers and old commentators – as well as the stuffy old pricks at the British Embassy in Washington who looked down as these Scouse scruffs – but that light was lit and it burned through the nation, and continues to burn to this day.
What is it? Life! Youth! Music! Sex! Excitement!... all the good stuff of life.
One person talks of the “palpable joy” and we see what was a very physical reaction to their presence, pent up energy triggered by their own puppyish physicality.
No wonder all these Beatles films are coming out. The times are dark again, and so constrained and dysfunctional that the idea of any band breaking out like The Beatles again is impossible. Those were innocent times, ours are not. No wonder we like to look back. Even for those of us who weren’t born, we look back on The Beatles with nostalgia.
The Beatles have ended up in the collective unconscious, loved by each new generation and this film – like them all! – manages to show exactly why.
