Butler's Cinema Scene

“THE BEATLES: EIGHT DAYS A WEEK — THE TOURING YEARS”  My rating: B+ (Opens Sept. 15 at the Tivoli)

106 minutes | No MPAA rating

There have been plenty of Beatles documentaries and no doubt there will be plenty more.

But if I had to explain to one of today’s teens what Beatlemania  was all about, I’d sit them down to watch Ron Howard’s “The Beatles: Eight Days a Week — The Touring Years.”

The doc focuses on the first five years of the Beatles’ timeline, ending with the 1966 concert at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park that ended their live performances.

Employing endless archival footage (some of it shot by fans and never before disseminated) and cleaned-up audio tracks that prove just how terrific a live band the Fab Four were (even if concertgoers couldn’t hear much because of all the screaming), the movie is more than just a factual document.

It is an emotional one.  Want to know what it was like to be young in 1964? Watch this movie.

What’s really amazing is how well the four Beatles — John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr — kept their shit together in the madhouse of Beatlemania.  They were bemused and not a little awed by it all, but tried to keep their heads on straight with cheeky humor and a what-the-hell attitude.

Asked if they saw themselves as pioneers of a cultural revolution, the Beatles said they were having a good “larf.” Who knew when it might end?

Ringo reveals how they had an entire floor of New York’s Plaza Hotel and still couldn’t get any privacy.  The four lads ended up hiding in a bathroom, laughing over the insanity of it all.

“The Beatles: Eight Days a Week” makes the case that far from being overnight sensations, this was a band that had been working tirelessly for several years, first in their native Liverpool and then in Hamburg, Germany. They lucked out in meeting Brian Epstein, who would become their manager and, as Paul McCartney puts it, “had a vision of us beyond what we had of ourselves.”

The film makes extensive use of new interviews with McCartney and Starr, and radio broadcaster Larry Kane offers terrific anecdotes about accompanying the Beatles on their first American tour.

Whoopi Goldberg was an early Beatles fan who by embracing these four white boys — she says she never looked at them and thought of race — made herself something of an outsider in her black community.  Nevertheless, she says, when she listened to their records or watched them on TV “the whole world lit up.”

And the performance footage is terrific. Of special interest to hard-core Beatles fans is the extended footage in the print being shown at the Tivoli. After the documentary proper ends and the closing credits have rolled, audiences will get the full 40-minute Beatles concert in Shea Stadium. It looks and sounds fantastic.

| Robert W. Butler