Beatles '64 (2024)

The doc follows Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr as they land in New York City in February 1964 and solidify their status as the biggest band in the world. “Beatles ’64” promises to tell “a more intimate behind the scenes story” of the Fab Four as they debut on “The Ed Sullivan Show” to more than 73 million viewers, which back then was the most-watched television event of all time.

A clip in Beatles ’64 features Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan making a salient observation: “The chances of your understanding anything going on in your own time are very small, except through the means provided by artists. Artists are people who enjoy living in the present.” That perspective is both supported and disproven by the film’s candid access to John, Paul, George and Ringo — surnames not required — on the cusp of global superstardom during their first visit to America in 1964.

The band members are by no means oblivious to the seismic momentum of Beatlemania, becoming virtual prisoners at New York’s Plaza Hotel as it’s surrounded by a mob of screaming fans. And yet they remain at that time disarmingly innocent, almost incredulous — fundamentally still four goofy working-class lads from Liverpool with mop-top haircuts who appear to view the hysteria mostly as a lark. Only in interviews years later do they even come close to acknowledging that historic trip as a major milestone in their ascendancy.

Fab Four documentaries have become a virtual cottage industry, to the point where you wonder if there’s anything left to add. But David Tedeschi’s film for Disney+ — produced by Martin Scorsese alongside surviving Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr and family representatives of John Lennon and George Harrison — has an ace up its sleeve. That’s the extensive fly-on-the-wall footage shot by direct cinema pioneers Albert and David Maysles over 14 whirlwind days, starting with the Beatles’ arrival at JFK International Airport in New York.

Originally commissioned for British television, this material first took shape as a half-hour program and then was expanded into a feature documentary that failed to get much attention due to bungled theatrical distribution. It’s more widely known as a recut 1991 version titled The Beatles: The First U.S. Visit — though despite the Maysles’ exalted status among cinephiles and the subjects’ enduring popularity, it has remained semi-obscure.

That seems astonishing when you see shots in which moments from 60 years ago still surge with vitality. I gasped at the poetry of a sequence captured from inside a car with the Beatles, as a young man pointing an 8mm camera at them races along the street beside the vehicle, and then gets left behind just as a cop on horseback comes into view.