Just how much Beatles content does Disney+ need? Three years after premiering Peter Jackson's nearly eight-hour documentary series The Beatles: Get Back, the streaming service offers the much more compact Beatles '64, which takes on an earlier era of the band with the conventional documentary format of talking-head interviews and archival footage. Hardcore fans who luxuriated in every bit of minutia in Jackson's meticulously remastered series about the recording of the band's 1970 Let It Be album may be less excited about the comparatively modest Beatles '64, although it also offers some rediscovered and restored period footage, along with remixed music overseen by producer Giles Martin.
Jackson is given special thanks, but the filmmaking titan with a more substantial presence is Martin Scorsese, who's credited as a producer and literally looms over the present-day interviews with Beatles drummer Ringo Starr, like an eager hanger-on who couldn't hold himself back from jumping in front of the camera. Scorsese previously co-directed documentaries on The New York Review of Books and singer David Johansen with Beatles '64 director David Tedeschi, so his participation likely involved more than just lending his name and attempting to ask Starr about noir movies.
Both Starr and Paul McCartney participate in new conversations (with McCartney showing off his recent Beatles photography exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum), and there are vintage interview clips from late Beatles members John Lennon and George Harrison. But Tedeschi is just as interested in the experiences of the fans and other onlookers during the two-week period when The Beatles first came to the U.S. in 1964, making their landmark appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Early in the movie, he cuts from screaming fans in 1964 to one of those fans in the present, reflecting on her childhood experiences with a mix of amusement and wonder.
It's fascinating to look back on the frenzy that greeted The Beatles through the recollections of the people who fueled it, but most of the interviews are more standard-issue testimonials from prominent figures like filmmaker David Lynch, writer Joe Queenan and music producer Jack Douglas. They're all ardent fans, and Queenan almost immediately tears up when talking about listening to The Beatles for the first time, but it's not the same as hearing from the anonymous teenagers who once built their entire identities around The Beatles and now have the benefit of experience and hindsight to frame those recollections.
Tedeschi still spends plenty of time on those early fans, and most of the 1964 segments are constructed from material shot by legendary documentary filmmakers Albert and David Maysles. The Maysles brothers first compiled their footage into the 1964 film What's Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A., which was itself later recut and rereleased in 1991 as The Beatles: The First U.S. Visit. So this is not exactly new ground to cover, even if Tedeschi unearths some outtakes and alternate cuts.
Still, for anyone who hasn't seen those past films, Beatles '64 provides an entertaining, unvarnished look at The Beatles in their casual, off-duty moments, goofing off with the Maysles brothers and their crew, and expressing wide-eyed enthusiasm at being featured in an actual movie. It also showcases less enduring personalities like New York City radio DJ Murray the K, who became a key point person for the band's U.S. visit. Thanks mostly to the talents of the Maysles brothers, Tedeschi is able to offer an immersive portrayal of the pop culture landscape at the time of The Beatles' arrival.
Beatles '64 is less blandly hagiographic than recent Disney+ music documentaries like Laurent Bouzereau's Music by John Williams and Frank Marshall's The Beach Boys, and Tedeschi devotes a decent amount of time to exploring the double standard around The Beatles' performances of songs by Black artists like the Isley Brothers and the Miracles. Both the Miracles' Smokey Robinson and Ronald Isley give The Beatles credit for drawing attention to their music, but the movie makes it clear that that attention didn't afford them the same breathless press coverage and chart success that The Beatles enjoyed.
Tedeschi also opens Beatles '64 not with scenes of The Beatles themselves, but with a montage of news coverage of John F. Kennedy, from his election in 1960 through his assassination in 1963. The movie repeatedly returns to the notion that The Beatles' visit was somehow a corrective to the national malaise that followed the Kennedy assassination, and that part of the rapturous reception to their upbeat, energetic music came from a desire to move on from such a grim period.
It's a half-formed thesis that never quite comes together, because Tedeschi includes it as just one of several threads in the 105-minute movie. It probably wouldn't be a good idea for Beatles '64 to be eight hours long, but if nothing else, it proves that there are still plenty more areas left to explore if Disney+ continues to expand its status as the streaming home of The Beatles.
Beatles '64
Directed by David Tedeschi
Streaming on Disney+
