By Andre Paras
Staff Writer
Sixty years after The Beatles’ explosion in the United States, fans still cannot get enough of the group and their history. Despite the band only being together for a decade, there’s still a surprising amount of rarities surfacing today.
Most notably, there was the three-part documentary series released in 2021 titled “The Beatles: Get Back,” featuring the band recording their final album and performing for the last time together. This is just one of a handful of documentaries about the band released in the past decade.
Last year, the band also released their final track, “Now and Then,” with the help of artificial intelligence reviving old, unused recordings.
Now, “Beatles ‘64” is the latest addition to The Beatles universe. What makes this specific documentary unique is that it’s focused on such a narrow, yet important period of the band’s early career instead of the end of their career, which recent documentaries put more of a focus on. The film follows a key two- week period in the band’s life as they arrive in the U.S. for the first time. This includes their iconic performance on the Ed Sullivan Show and more big concerts at staple venues in New York City.
This documentary was created by the tag team of Director David Tedeschi and Producer Martin Scorsese, making it their third film together. They bring this rare footage, recorded by renowned filmmakers Albert and David Maysles, to life.
The story begins by immersing the audience in its setting with archival footage of President John F. Kennedy’s speeches. The opening credits consist of news of his assassination and Americans mourning the late president’s funeral ceremony. This montage is soundtracked to a somber cover of The Beatles’ “All My Loving.”
This all establishes the broken state of the nation that The Beatles were coming into, just months after the assassination. Naturally, the best art comes from dark times, from The Great Depression to the recession pop of the 2000s and again today. As a result, the band’s bright and peppy energy instantly consoled the grieving nation.
Fans wanted to get a hold of the band in any way they could. Men were getting Beatles-inspired haircuts. A hotel sold pieces of towels the band used. Some weren’t even into rock and roll – but they were into The Beatles.
Shot on film in crisp black and white, this movie provides a look behind closed doors into the young and goofy members of the band. It’s as real of a depiction you’ll find of a group conscious of cameras recording them.
The restoration also makes it some of the clearest footage of early Beatlemania out there, along with being a time capsule to a greatly different New York City with plenty of b-roll video.
Along with all this footage from 1964, this film also weaves together old footage and modern-day talking head interviews nicely. There’s a moment when present-day Paul McCartney, The Beatles’ bassist and vocalist, was recalling a memory through a photograph. Through a hard cut in the edit, we watch this photo come to life and we’re snapped back into the 60s again with a wave of fans.
These present-day interviews consist of the two living Beatles, McCartney and drummer Ringo Starr, along with a well-decorated list of artists alike. To name a few, there are director and filmmaker David Lynch, Motown singer-songwriter Smokey Robinson, lead singer Ronald Isley of The Isley Brothers, photographer Harry Benson and more.
These interviews drive where the documentary goes next. It discusses why the band was so beloved, along with personal anecdotes people had about the group’s music. There’s one key idea brought up here that isn’t talked about enough though, and that’s where The Beatles get their sound from.
“The [Beatles were the] first white artist ever of their magnitude that I ever heard in my life say, ‘Yeah, we grew up listening to Black music,’” said Robinson in his interview. “‘We love Motown. We listen to Black music. We know this person, this person’…No other white artist had ever said that.”
Young fans loved how the rock and roll sound got them moving, while parents saw this as a danger to society. Their sound, combined with the group’s image of soft masculinity, drove fans who’ve never listened to it before to this genre. Subconsciously, audiences were buying into a more white version of rock and roll that felt more real and tender as opposed to that of a sexualized icon Elvis Presley.
In a New York City fortnight, The Beatles watched themselves become cemented as the biggest band in the world. This only marked the beginning of the British Invasion in the United States.
They did all of this in a world before the internet, where mass media and mass culture were strong. It’s bittersweet to think a new pop cultural phenomenon will never match the height of The Beatles, and “Beatles ‘64” did a great job of placing you in a world where it was possible.
