The Beatles: Eight Days a Week review – moptops conquer the world
Blink and you’ll miss it, but Ron Howard’s intensely enjoyable documentary about the Beatles’ touring years has a great surreal moment at the very beginning. The moptops are getting out of the plane in New York, on their way to a date with destiny on The Ed Sullivan Show, and the newsreel camera briefly catches a couple of placards held up in the huge airport crowd. “Beatles Unfair 2 Bald Men” reads one, and another says: “England Get Out of Ireland.” The images vanish, and their atypical sentiments are in any case drowned by the global scream of unironic adulation. Yet both echo other undercurrents in Beatlemania: a fear of these weirdly attractive aliens, a hatred of youth culture and youth itself, and perhaps mixed feelings in New York and the US about this extraordinary new British invasion. Maybe Paul McCartney even saw that second placard and modified it as a song title for Wings.
Is there really anything more to say about the Beatles? Well, Howard gives us a movie conceived on similar lines to his non-fiction features such as Apollo 13 or Frost/Nixon, real people tested in the fire of publicity, with the same classic narrative arc of personal growth. Yet he persuades you that there might be something new to say, in a film that includes interviews with the two surviving members McCartney and Ringo Starr, archive material with Harrison and Lennon, and intriguing conversations with present-day fans such as Elvis Costello, Whoopi Goldberg and Malcolm Gladwell (whose 2008 book Outliers brings the Beatles’ Hamburg years into his theory that greatness takes 10,000 hours of practice).
By: Peter Bradshaw
Source: The Guardian
