Beatles '64 review: life in the eye of the Beatlemania hurricane
The new documentary from director David Tedeschi boasts revealing footage from when the Fab Four conquered America, but is little more than a fan celebration
Apple Corps; Disney+
- Jamie Healy
★★★☆☆
Beatles '64 is on Disney+ from Friday. Add it to your watchlist
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Apple Corps loves an anniversary, and this documentary gets a release in the 60th year of the Beatles first touching down at New York’s recently renamed JFK airport, poised to change the cultural landscape for ever.
Film-making brothers Albert and David Maysles were granted access (nearly) all areas for the group’s 14-day visit, which took them from the Big Apple to Washington and then to Miami. Their priceless footage captures, in true cinéma vérité style, what it was like to live in the eye of the Beatlemania hurricane.
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That meant being hectored by reporters, besieged by teenage girls as well as wannabe “fifth Beatles” (including overbearing radio DJ Murray the K) – not to mention having to attend stuffy receptions held in the band’s honour. This daily grind would be satirised later the same year in the movie A Hard Day’s Night, which was released before the Maysles’ film saw the light of day.
Press awating The Beatles. Apple Corps; Disney+
Titled What's Happening! The Beatles in the USA, the Maysles’ movie serves as the backbone of this release, which has been cleaned up, repurposed and added to by Martin Scorsese’s regular musical collaborator David Tedeschi. Augmenting the original footage are newly shot interviews with various famous fans who were touched by the events of February 1964, including a visibly moved Joe Queenan, who likens the Beatles’ arrival in America to “the light coming on”. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr are also interviewed — albeit separately — but their contributions are all but drowned out by too many competing voices, making this more of a fan celebration than anything else.
Beatles ’64 is at its best when in the company of its core foursome, with John, Paul, George and Ringo running rings around the press, larking about in hotel rooms, letting their (comparatively long) hair down at nightclubs, and rocking out on stage. For all its laughably rickety staging, the Washington Coliseum gig demonstrates what a tight, exciting live act they really were, tearing through Long Tall Sally. Director David Lynch, who was there in person, nails it beautifully, saying: “It was so loud, you can’t believe. Girls shuddering, crying, screaming their heart out. It was phenomenal.”
The Beatles departing from their plane to a sea of press. Apple Corps; Disney+
Sadly, too many of the other talking-head testimonies turn into rambling monologues, killing the pace of the film. At times, it feels like each and every one of that record TV audience of 73 million that watched the Beatles perform on The Ed Sullivan Show has been given their say. Padding out the film further is a hodgepodge of archive interviews with the Fabs from later in their lives, with the continual back-and-forth proving more jarring than illuminating. The vintage TV clips of philosopher Marshall McLuhan endlessly waffling on are just baffling.
Ultimately, this feels like a needlessly reheated Apple confection; the company having already re-edited the Maysles’ footage back in 1991 for The Beatles: The First US Visit. The extras that have been bolted on — nostalgic reminiscences, scattershot sociological contextualising and a surfeit of archive — only diminishes the impact of what we’re here to enjoy, and that is a back-of-the-limo seat alongside the Beatles as they conquer America.
The original film and audio has at least been given a pristine polish, allowing us to appreciate the lads in their prime and sounding great. It’s clear they’re thrilled to be in the land that birthed rock’n’roll, soul and r’n’b, with Paul rarely seen without a Pepsi-branded transistor radio pressed to his ear, absorbing everything he can.
Beatles ’64 does make a telling companion piece with Disney’s Get Back docuseries, which offered a similar candid look at the band, only in its death throes, just five years later.
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By contrast, the prevailing mood of Beatles ’64 is one of hope for the future. Despite all the pressures and craziness around them, the lads are relishing the ride as their fame rockets ever skywards. And for an America still mourning JFK’s assassination, their arrival was a sign of better things to come. For the youth of the 60s, here reflecting on that time, this was year zero and the beginning of the healing process.
Authors
Jamie Healy
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