Tom Dunne: Another Beatles documentary? Yes, and it's well worth a watch
The Fab Four arrive in America, in a still from Beatles 64 on Disney+.
Beatles ’64 is an all-new documentary on Disney+ from producer Martin Scorsese and director David Tedeschi. There might be some who read that and ask, “What, more Beatles?” but trust me, once again, it is so worth it.
Yes there was the music. Yes there were screaming girls and 73 million Americans tuning into the Ed Sullivan show. But was there something even bigger afoot? Was it, as one reviewer put it, the “mythic ecstatic moment which restored Britain’s postwar pride.”
There’s a lot to take in in. England was on the winning side in WW2, but in came out of it hugely diminished, its empire gone, its coffers empty, its cities in ruins. Rationing only ended on July 4, 1954, nine years after the war itself. For many, it didn’t feel like winning.
Did The Beatles really lead an entire nation out of that post war malaise? I put it to you, that by late 1963 they already had. They were the first generation not to be conscripted and that was crucial. As Lennon puts it here– “We and our ilk were created in the vacuum of non-conscription. We were the army that never was.”
As to their effect on America, well where do you begin? The Americans absolutely won the Second World War and came out it enriched and powerful beyond measure. It did feel like winning, but it left America with a WW2-hardened, rigid view of masculinity. And that view didn’t have long hair.
But there is another layer to America’s hysterical reaction to The Beatles. Just three months earlier they had lost JFK to an assassin’s bullet. He had been the poster boy for a new youthful vision of America. His ideas on civil rights, space exploration and social reform resonated deeply.
Plus, he had a glamourous, youthful energy about him. He’d been the first to align with the rise of the Baby Boom generation. He seemed to carry their hopes and dreams. His death, played out on live TV, traumatised and shocked those young Americans.
A nation bowed its head, and did so, until, it would appear, it heard a song called ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ on the radio. And then it looked up to see four charming, funny and talented young men on its TV screens. The scene was set for the perfect storm.
Beatles ’64 captures that storm in all its culture changing magnificence. From Leonard Bernstein’s daughter Jamie, wheeling the family TV from the library to the dining room, to a Latino family in a more modest apartment starring wide eyed in rapture at the Beatles on screen.
Throughout, The Beatles themselves are brilliant. Baffled by the storm around them, they seem imbued with both boundless energy and good form. Wise-cracking, laughing, obviously enjoying each other’s company and eternally cheery, they would lift the darkest of days.
But the real stars are the screaming girls. Even at this remove they find it hard to explain the ecstatic hysteria they seemed to just poor forth from them at every mention or possible sighting of their four heroes. But in interview they themselves are just so polite, bright and eternally positive.
Others have written that it was a moment during which we witnessed young women not just embracing their own sexuality but also their “own agency and assuredness.” They are wonderful in interview, but also, given what we now know about what the Beatles will go on to do, they are also completely right.
The Beatles will leave America to start work on A Hard Day’s Night and produce, between US and UK releases, six albums of material in the next 14 months. That will take them to early 1965. Revolver, Rubber Soul, Sgt. Pepper are in the future. This is really just a few days in the life.
But what a few days. The commentator from this whose words have stayed with me most since watching Beatles ’64 is Betty Friedan. Betty was an American feminist writer and activist whose 1963 book The Feminine Mystique is often credited with sparking the second wave of American feminism.
Reacting to The Beatles on a CBC chat show in 1964 she said “Those boys are wearing their hair long and saying no to the masculine mystique. No to that brutal, sadistic, tight lipped, crew cut, Prussian, big muscle Ernest Hemingway masculinity.
“The man who is strong enough to be gentle,” she adds, “that is a new man.”
