Seems the Mouse will offer new Beatles content on its channel every late autumn/early winter? It‘s a good new tradition, and far better than remakes of cartoons, Disney. Anyway: Beatles 64, produced by Martin Scorsese, is a documentary heavily based on the contemporary 1964, documentary „What‘s Happening? The Beatles in the USA“ by Albert and David Maysles, with additional footage consisting mainly of a) interviews of the fans (female and male) who got interviewed back in the day and/or are famous now (David Lynch, for example), b) interviews with Ringo and Paul now, c) post Beatles interviews with John and George from the 70s and in George‘s case 80s and 90s, d) interviews with surviving black musicians the Beatles themselves were fannish about, and e) news reels (mainly American, but also some British). All of which are focused on the year in which Beatlemania went stateside, the impact the Beatles had on the US during their first tour there, and vice versa.

Now I did see the original documentary movie ages ago. Compared with, say, Let it Be (the movie) versus Get Back (the three part series by Peter Jackson), there‘s far less „new“ (i.e. new to casual or not-fans) footage, and no new interpretation as to why the Beatles in 1964 made it so big in the US (when previous attempts by Brian Epstein to get the Americans interested in later 1963 had been rebuffed) - it‘s the old „the US was shocked and depressed because of the Kennedy assassination (indeed this new movie opens with Kennedy footage), and then the Fab Four with their energy and songs brought much needed joy and cheer to the national consciousness“ theory, essentially. But I found the overall result still worth watching: from a fannish point, naturally, because the intervening decades didn‘t diminish the impact of the young Beatles in their charm, energy, occasional snark, and Giles Martin (as in, son of George Martin) mixed and cleaned up those concert excerpts amazingly, sound wise. But also because those interviews with the fans - both from the original documentary - and I don‘t recall that many, Scorsese must have inserted unused footage, when they‘re teens, and now, the women looking back and talking about why this was so important for them - are very poignant, as are the likes of Smokey Robin and Ronald Isley saying what it meant to them that the Beatles not just sang their songs but also their praises in interview after interview (at a time when white musicians praising black musicians and naming them as influences wasn‘t yet common). Or Jamie Bernstein (daughter of Leonard B and Felicia) describing how she and her siblings made their parents watch that first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show, intercut with tv footage of 1960s Leonard Bernstein refuting the (then, at the start of it all) common tropes of Beatles (or any) pop music as dumb and unworthy declaring the lads and their songs to be innovative and amazing. Or 1960s Betty Friedan (!!!! Had not known this!) in black and white declaring that the Beatles were offering a new form of masculinity, versus the traditional macho tight lipped square jawed one.

(Sidenote: she‘s talking about their public personae, of course, not about their actual personalities, which she hardly could have been familiar with.)

Nitpicks: Cynthia Lennon was with her husband during that 1964 trip. Now it was a very deliberate decision to keep her out of the original documentary, as the fact that one of the four new teen idols was already married as deemed not conductive to fannish adoration and marketing, but as far as I know she‘s still alive, and you‘d think for a 2024 movie, she‘d be a great witness to interview, being simultanously an insider and an outsider. As it is, she‘s never as much as mentioned directly. You do hear at one point John talk to her, saying something like „Cyn, look!“ off camera, and late in the movie you see two or three photographs showing her and John sitting next to each other in the train, but otherwise she‘s still Invisible Woman. Now for all I know, it could be that she‘s not able, health wise, to be interviewed, but if that‘s not the case: missed opportunity, Scorsese!

(On the other hand, he did get Ronnie Spector, whom I did assume was dead already, talking about how she rescued the boys from being locked into their NY hotel rooms by fannish adoration, smuggling them out and into Harlem, where at that point no one knew or cared who they were when they went clubbing with Ronnie. This was great.)

In conclusion: if you are feeling somewhat in the doldrums and want to be cheered up and are not opposed to a glimpse in the 1960s, this documentary might just be the ticket. Those songs and their performers and writers work as well as ever. (But then I would say that.) (They do, too!)