If there is any chapter in the Beatles saga that Beatles fans around the world feel they know deep down, it is the early months of 1964, when the Beatles first came to America – an event that shook the world, and changed it profoundly. “Beatles 64” is a documentary chronicling the three weeks the Beatles spent in the United States starting in February of that year. They came to New York to perform on “The Ed Sullivan Show” (their first appearance on the show was on February 9). They then took a train to Washington, D.C. to perform a concert at the Washington Coliseum, then traveled to Miami Beach, where they made their second appearance on “Ed Sullivan”.
“Beatles ’64” begins with an extended sequence devoted to the era of John F. Kennedy in the early 1960s — because, as has often been noted, JFK had been assassinated just over two months before their arrival, and that tragedy set the stage for the Beatles. They saved America and the world from the disaster of losing JFK. Other aspects of the Beatles covered in “Beatles 64” that at first glance might seem all too familiar include the Beatles’ rudeness at press conferences (when asked why their music turned people on, John joked: “If we knew, we’d be a band Another “group and managers”) and of course conveyed the ecstasy that occurred between the Beatles and their fans, the majority of whom were screaming, crying, and delirious teenage girls. Everywhere they went, the Beatles unleashed bouts of bliss, which they reflected in their shows.
But we’ve seen it all before. The strong appeal of “Beatles ’64,” which stars Martin Scorsese as lead producer, was directed by David Tedeschi (editor of Scorsese’s two-part HBO film “George Harrison: Living in the Material World” and co-director of “Beatles ’64”). His 2022 doc by David Johansen, “Personality Crisis: One Night Only”), is that he takes this legendary, deeply swooning moment from pop music history, which we almost all now see through a mythical lens, and humanizes it in an exhilarating way.
The film, which premieres November 29 on Disney+, is based on footage originally shot by cinema vérité legends David and Albert Maysles, first seen in their 1964 documentary “What’s Happening!” “The Beatles in the USA” but “Beatles ’64” also includes 17 minutes that never appeared in this film. The Maysles, following the Beatles, shot 11 hours of material, and Scorsese and Tedeschi went back over all that 16mm footage, which was amazingly restored by Peter Jackson’s WingNut Studios.
The black-and-white scenes of the Beatles sitting around their suite at the Plaza Hotel, or of their fans gathered in the street below, look like they were shot yesterday. The technological modernization is amazing, but the reason the footage feels so vivid is because the Miles were extraordinary filmmakers, always discovering the truth behind the myths (which is why their work has always stood the test of time). They interview several Beatles fans, and while we tend to view these girls as clichéd teenagers — the latest iteration of a line that began with fans of Frank Sinatra and Elvis — the Miles present them as individuals. What we see is that a lot of girls are shockingly shy and concerned about their Beatle worship.
Another thing that sets “Beatles ’64” apart is that the film is full of insightful commentary: memories of the final days of many of these fans, as well as reflections on what it all meant to figures like David Lynch, Joe Queenan, and Jimmy. Bernstein, and Smokey Robinson, who speaks with a ferocious insight into the nature of unguarded female emotionalism in dictating the shape of pop culture. Whether it’s Jamie Bernstein (Leonard’s daughter) talking about how she would drag the family TV into the dining room to watch Sullivan’s show, or David Lynch evoking what music like the early Beatles does to you, or Betty Friedan, in an old TV clip, speaking with terrific eloquence about how to embody a band. The Beatles’ new vision of masculinity cast upon the old, taut model, these testimonials to the consumer quality of our collective passion for the Fab Four.
At the beginning, there is a series of the Beatles on the move, each of them wearing headphones that allow them to hear recordings of their voices. There’s something poignantly metaphorical about that. The Beatles will preside over a world where projections of who they are take on a strangely separate life from themselves. The documentary shows you that they understood this instinctively from day one. They sit in their “prison” in a suite in the Plaza, putting in long hours (scenes that might have been a model for “A Hard Day’s Night”), always cutting off the strange Liverpool outfit that takes everything that way. lightlyAs if it weren’t real, they were perfectly positioned, as characters, to become the eye of the new media storm.
The film cuts to later footage as well: interviews with the Beatles from the 1970s (like, say, John Lennon on The Tomorrow Show), along with comments from today’s Paul and Ringo, all of which add context to the idea that the Beatles were, in 1964, artists For once in a century they channel something bigger than themselves. They grew up in the gritty post-World War II seaside town of Liverpool in a tough hellhole, and there’s something almost poetic about the global electricity they unleashed by coming to the United States, a country that has always been based on “the pursuit of goals.” Happiness.” With the Beatles, the chase was finally over. It was happiness receipt. They were the ones who said to America and the world: You deserve something that makes you feel good like this.
You can feel it in the live shows, reworked by Giles Martin so we can hear how inspired their playing is even with all the screaming. Songs like “Please Please Me” and “This Boy” burst with new enthusiasm, and there’s a sequence from the Washington, D.C. show of Paul singing “Long Tall Sally” that elevates that song to a level of its own “Little Richard-meets-Beatles” dimension of gleeful glee. . When Paul sings “Have some fun tonight!” He turns it into a new age doctrine.
The Maysles, God bless them, have covered the waterfront. They interview Harlem residents about the Beatles (we hear enthusiasm from teenagers, and skepticism from slightly older folks feeling the sting of appropriation). They recorded a family, the Gonzales, watching the Beatles’ first appearance on “Ed Sullivan” in their kitchen. Their teenage daughter is quiet but distraught and soaring high. this This is what the revolution looked like.
The Beatles brought joy to the world because they felt it. And there was the love that you could feel for each other. George Harrison talks about how everyone in Liverpool was comedians, and in the documentary’s offstage sequences, we see how the insolence of the four Beatles – their simple irreverence – becomes a form of grace. Surrounded by a cult following, the Beatles thrived because they never took any of it seriously. They were passionate musicians but soul comedians. That’s why they can imitate and absorb thousands of patterns. The most profound moment in “Beatles ’64” arrives at the end, when Lennon, in an interview given to French television, sums up what he believes the Beatles meant by saying that a new ship was sailing, and that the Beatles were the ship. The one in the crow’s nest announcing the ship’s arrival. But the ship was bigger than it was. We still cling to the remains of that ship. But oh, whatever happened to the Beatles’ joy wisdom?