A new documentary on Disney Plus retells the story of a pop culture watershed.
How do you feel about Disney Plus treating the legacy of the Beatles like it's corporate IP? That's the main hurdle standing between you and some of this holiday season's most tempting comfort television, "Beatles '64," a new documentary recounting the historic two-week stint that the band first spent on American soil, earning its permanent position in the greater American psyche.
Directed by David Tedeschi and coproduced by Martin Scorsese, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, family members of John Lennon and George Harrison, and others, "Beatles 64" repurposes much of the vérité footage shot by Albert and David Maysles after the renowned documentarians were hired to hustle over to John F. Kennedy International Airport and shoot the Beatles stepping off their airplane into history. They ended up tagging along for the trip, resulting in "What's Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A.," later re-edited to "The Beatles: The First U.S. Visit."
Tedeschi's recycling means "Beatles '64" is nowhere near as revealing as "The Beatles: Get Back," Peter Jackson's sprawling 2021 film about the making of the "Let It Be" album, also released by Disney Plus around Thanksgiving. But for those yearning to feel the happy warmth of American Beatlemania in its earliest days -- wailing fans, news conferences as comedy, skeptical parents hovering over wide-eyed children in the glow of "The Ed Sullivan Show" -- it's all here.
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Comfort, not mania, is the film's big framing device. "Beatles '64" opens with a montage of Kennedy speeches before eventually cutting to his flag-draped casket and some explanatory text: "Months after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the Beatles arrived in New York City to perform on 'The Ed Sullivan Show.'" This isn't a new idea, the Beatles as generational healers, but deep in the film, a latter-day McCartney explains it as if the notion had just dawned on him: "When we came, America had been in mourning. It was quite shortly after Kennedy had been assassinated. Maybe America needed something like the Beatles to lift it out of mourning, and just sort of say, 'Life goes on.' The joy you see in these audiences is like they're being lifted out of sorrow."
The rest of "Beatles '64" aims to return us to that happiness, through the handful of live performances the Beatles gave on this trip, but even more so through the Maysles brothers' footage of the band goofing around inside planes, trains, news conferences and hotel rooms. There's a musicality to the foursome's nonstop playfulness, and as if to prove it while imprisoned in a Manhattan hotel room, Starr grabs a piece of silverware and taps out a new, alien gallop to "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" as the song plays on the radio. What a moment. Everyone within earshot of the Beatles seems to be screaming, but they're just keeping their cool, having their fun. At one point, when a reporter asks McCartney about the band's impact "on Western culture," he shrugs it off, dismissing Beatlemania as "a laugh."
For fans camped outside New York's Plaza Hotel as the Beatles prepared for Sullivan, it was more like a sob, a wail, a paroxysm that tied joy and desire into a new kind of knot. "I ran after 'em, and I fell on the ground 10 times!" says one fan. "They should have Beatles wallpaper," says another, somewhat prophetically. It's astonishing to see these young people wearing such complicated new emotions on their faces. Then, in one of the film's best sequences, a camera leaves the Plaza and heads uptown to Harlem, where a journalist asks members of the Black community what they think of the Beatles. The interviewees are all over the map, expressing acceptance, enthusiasm, indifference and disgust, with one particularly skeptical young man saying he much prefers the music of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. It's good to be reminded how big this world really is.
The film's climax and the trip's climax are, of course, one and the same: the Beatles performing for a television audience of more than 73 million people. But instead of simply panning across the raving crowd at "The Ed Sullivan Show" and leaving it there, we're transported into the living room of the Gonzalez family, where two teenage girls are witnessing history. What we get to witness: their mystified half-smiles, their fidgeting hands, their hair and shoulders as they bounce to the beat as if against their own volition. Try to put all of those screamers and weepers pushing against police barricades out of your mind. For most, Beatlemania was a phenomenon of intimacy, and these two deserve to be the face of it. What ever happened to them?
Tedeschi doesn't tell us, and his attempts to connect the past and the present tend to fall flat throughout. In the present day, Starr shows Scorsese a collection of his wildest Beatles suits just because. For proof of the Beatles' musical influence, we are presented with the testimony of Terence Trent D'Arby. Cool singer, but why him? Then, in the film's most surprising and promising left turn, David Lynch appears. Turns out that the visionary filmmaker was one of the fans in attendance at the Washington Coliseum when the Beatles played their first U.S. concert in Washington on Feb. 11, 1964.
Someone could probably turn this into a documentary in and of itself, but somehow, even a mind as vivid and deep as Lynch's doesn't have anything new to tell us about the Beatlemania. "It was so loud, you can't believe," he says with passionate glee. "Girls shuddering, crying, screaming their heart out! It was phenomenal!" Like a character in one of his films, he sounds lost in a dream. Is there anything to do but try to join him there?
