With the success of Peter Jackson’s brilliant documentary, THE BEATLES: GET BACK, about the Fab Four in 1969, I suppose it was inevitable that someone else would take a kick at the can of nostalgia. That someone is documentary filmmaker David Tedeschi, who previously served as the editor on Martin Scorsese’s ROLLING THUNDER REVUE: A BOB DYLAN STORY; GEORGE HARRISON: LIVING IN THE MATERIAL WORLD and SHINE A LIGHT (about the Rolling Stones). With BEATLES ’64, Tedeschi looks back at when the Beatles made their first visit to the US.

It’s February 1964 and America is still reeling from the assassination of President Kennedy barely two months earlier. But young people’s thoughts have turned elsewhere. Beatlemania, which has already swept through the UK, has crossed the pond, as the Brits like to call the Atlantic. John, Paul, George and Ringo arrived in the States to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show and perform a couple concerts in Washington, DC and New York City. BEATLES ’64 relives that exciting time with a mixture of archival footage shot by noted documentary filmmakers Albert and David Maysels, and interviews, both contemporary and archival of the four lads from Liverpool themselves.

Although my family watched Ed Sullivan that night, as we did every Sunday night at 8 pm, I guess I was too young to remember it being only five years old at the time. Certainly, though, 11 months later when my mother asked me what she should buy my soon-to-be 9-year-old brother for his birthday, I immediately said that he’d want a Beatles album, and so she bought “Something New”, the band’s fifth release in North America. Beatlemania had bitten me too. Nevertheless, BEATLES ’64 is not the slam dunk of a winner for me that I thought it would be. There is just far too much footage of the guys sitting holed up in their hotel suite at the Plaza while throngs of screaming teenage girls wait outside for a glimpse of their pop idols. This is footage that we saw before in the outstanding 1991 documentary, THE BEATLES: THE FIRST U.S. VISIT. By comparison, BEATLES ’64 is a Fab Bore.

To Tedeschi’s credit, he was able to track down one of the women whom the Maysels interviewed shrieking outside the hotel back in 1964 which, let’s be honest, was probably not that hard to do. I know two people who saw the Beatles in concert in Hong Kong later that year. Filmmaker David Lynch, who was at the concert in DC also gives his recollections and perspective, but some of the other interviewees are real headscratchers. I can’t figure out what merited Jamie Bernstein to have so much screen time other than that she’s Leonard Bernstein’s daughter. Almost as baffling is a clip of Pat Boone singing “Tutti Fruitti” or Smokey Robinson singing a cringeworthy cover version of “Yesterday”. I get why Robinson is in the film but the Beatles didn’t record “Yesterday” until 1965. In typical Scorsese fashion, the legendary director makes a cameo appearance interviewing Paul at McCartney’s photographic exhibit, entitled “Eyes of the Storm”, at the Brooklyn Museum.

But that’s really what this film is about — the tornado that was swirling around the Beatles while they themselves were keeping their heads together. Tedeschi, however, pads his story with multiple questionable talking heads and even the Beatles themselves, all saying the same thing. It was a crazy time. That is quite obvious from the first five minutes of the movie. The rest, unfortunately, is a real yawner.

BEATLES ’64 is streaming now on Disney+. This one is only for the most rabid of Beatles fans.

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