"Beatles '64": two weeks that changed history. Review

“One day we received a phone call from England. It was Granada TV telling us that in a couple of hours the Beatles would be arriving in New York, at Idlewild Airport, recently renamed John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and asking us if we wanted to film them. I put my hand on the microphone of the handset and asked my brother David: ‘Who are the Beatles? Are they interesting?’ He knew who they were, so we made a deal on the phone and rushed to the airport with the camera and tape recorder” (Albert Maisley)

Albert and David Maisley – they both died, Albert in 2015 and David in 1987 – were 38 and 33 years old respectively when they received the call that in some way made them go down in history. For four years they had been shooting documentaries, in the style that in America was called “direct cinema” (shoulder camera, natural light, live footage), in Europe “cinéma vérité”.

The Maisley brothers went to the airport, and followed the Beatles throughout their first stay in America, from 7 to 21 February 1964: their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in New York, the concert at the Coliseum in Washington, the concert at Carnegie Hall in New York, the trip to Miami for the second appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, the two days of quasi-vacation in Miami. Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, had approved the Granada TV project, reserving editorial control over the documentary, and allowed the Maisleys to always remain with the group: in the limousine, in the hotel rooms, on the train that took them to New York in Washington, on the plane that took them from New York to Miami. An absolutely privileged situation that the two brothers knew how to make the best use of, without ever claiming to “script” their film shoots but limiting themselves to being there with the 16mm camera always on – the mode that today we call “fly on the wall” – and thus earning the acceptance and sympathy of the four and their entourage.

The first broadcast version of the documentary was 36 minutes long and was broadcast as early as February 12 on Granada TV in Great Britain under the title “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! The Beatles in New York” – the filming obviously only concerned the first days of the quartet and their (small) entourage’s stay in the USA.

A second version was an 81-minute (according to other sources 45-minute) documentary, “What’s happening! The Beatles in the USA”, which was broadcast on American TV on 13 November 1964 (it did not make it to the cinema due to contractual disputes), and which the Maisleys themselves re-edited in 1991 in an 83-minute version, “The Beatles: The first US visit”, including some sequences of the Beatles’ participation in the Ed Sullivan Show (which were not there in the first version) but unfortunately eliminating several sequences in which Brian Epstein appeared. According to some, there is also a fourth, even different version, with audio commentary by one of the two Maisleys. What was on YouTube of these versions has been made to disappear, leaving only a few scattered fragments that escaped Apple’s careful censorship. And (for the moment) this “making of” commented by Albert Maisley remains.

The material filmed by the two brothers (who a few years later, in 1970, made “Gimme Shelter”, the film about the Rolling Stones’ American tour which culminated in the disastrous free concert in Altamont) largely constitutes the raw material on which the director David Tedeschi, with the production of Martin Scorsese, for his “Beatles ’64”, which will debut on November 29th exclusively on Disney+ (it lasts 106 minutes). The footage of the Maisleys was restored by Peter Jackson’s team with the same techniques used for “Get back”, and the material taken from the appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show was also restored for video and audio (the latter by the “usual” Giles Martin). Sequences of interviews carried out for the documentary (with among others Jaime Bernstein, Leonard’s daughter; Sananda Maitreya formerly Terence Trent D’Arby; Smokey Robinson; David Lynch and Ronald Isley) or recovered from archives (Ronnie Spector) were added to the original material ).

Of the four Beatles, Paul McCartney was interviewed specifically, taking the opportunity to underline the sociological consideration that has now become commonplace (and also underlined by the opening sequences of “Beatles ’64”), namely that the arrival of the Beatles was useful to lift the mood of Americans after the mourning for the assassination of John Kennedy in November ’63 (in 2001 McCartney called Albert Maisley to make him make the film “The love you make”, about the experience of he lived in New York before and after 9/11). Ringo Starr is present with a short conversation with Scorsese and snippets of past interviews; as (of course) John Lennon and George Harrison are also included with clips from interviews conducted when they were alive.

But, frankly, these contributions in “talking heads” format are not fundamental, and we could have done without them. What matters in “Beatles ’64” is the vivid documentation of the Beatles’ two weeks in America, here caught in the midst of the enthusiasm for their triumphal landing in the even more enthusiastic USA (Paul goes around with a transistor radio sponsored by Pepsi Cola who listens to Beatles songs broadcast on the radio), and still able to have fun despite the seclusion to which they are forced to avoid the siege of the fans, in particular by answering with the typical Liverpudlian spirit to the very banal questions of the American press (“Can you really sing?” John: “We have to get paid first”). We see them on a fun evening at the Peppermint Lounge, on a much less fun evening at the American Embassy in Washington, at the pool in Miami.

And when we don’t see them (because the Maisleys were not allowed into the CBS studios for the Ed Sullivan Show), the two brothers pull off a masterstroke: they knock on the door of a family who is watching the show on TV and they document the event through the eyes of young girls fascinated by the screen.

Watching “Beatles ’64”, the latest Disney+ version (which I was able to preview courtesy of), I often thought that in some way the work of the Maisley brothers was a forerunner of the directorial work they will do, starting just two weeks after the Beatles returned to England, Richard Lester with the film “A hard day’s night”. And also to think that it would have been nice if all the material shot by the Maisleys had been recovered and restored, audio and video, to obtain an integral and good quality version, and published as it was, without additions and without manipulations and without comments external.

But these are the usual considerations of a Beatles fundamentalist historiographer: forgive me.

Ah, speaking of music: here are the songs contained in the documentary’s soundtrack. I think I can say, barring my own distractions, that none of this, with the exception of “Twist and shout”, can be seen and heard in the documentary from start to finish. But Universal released them, entire, digitally.

Beatles ’64 (Music from the Disney+ Documentary)

She Loves You (2023 Mix)

The Beatles