THE BEATLES: EIGHT DAYS A WEEK - THE TOURING YEARS (2016)

Genre: Documentary
Director: Ron Howard
Cast: Paul McCartney, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, George Harrison
Runtime: 2 hrs 18 mins
Rating: TBA
Released By: Shaw  
Official Website: 

Opening Day: 3 November 2016

Synopsis: After their now-legendary North American debut on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1964, The Beatles transfixed the U.S. and the tremors were felt worldwide, transforming music and pop culture forever with their records and television appearances. The Beatles’ extraordinary musicianship and charisma also made them one of the greatest live bands of all time. In The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years, Oscar®-winning director Ron Howard (A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13) explores the history of The Beatles through the lens of the group’s concert performances, from their early days playing small clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg to their unprecedented world tours in packed stadiums around the globe from New York to Melbourne to Tokyo. The first feature-length documentary authorized by The Beatles since the band’s breakup in 1970, Eight Days a Week features rare and never-before-seen archival footage of shows and interviews, plus new interviews with Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and numerous prominent observers. The film captures the exhilaration of The Beatles’ phenomenal rise to fame as well as the toll it eventually took on the band members, prompting them to stop touring altogether in August 1966 and devote their prodigious musical energy to the series of ground-breaking studio recordings for which they are best known today.

Movie Review:

So much has been said about the Beatles and Beatlemania that you wonder ‘what else is there to say’, and indeed, there is nothing groundbreaking to be found here in Ron Howard’s documentary on the Fab Four. Yet by mixing archival footage of concert performances and news footage with new interviews of Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr and previously taped encounters of John Lennon and George Harrison, Howard successfully captures the zeitgeist of that point in the 60s when the Beatles were at their zenith and Beatlemania was all the rage. Oh yes, Howard’s focus (like its title implies) is on the early years between June 1962 and August 1966 – where the band toured 90 cities in 15 different countries and performed 815 times – until the exhaustion led them to abandon the road, concentrate on making music in the studio and the production of perhaps their most acclaimed studio album ‘Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band’.

For those who had not lived through that period, it will feel like a very different time – and it was. From civil rights demonstrations to President Kennedy’s assassination to the University of Texas sniper, there was plenty of tumult going around in the United States where the bulk of the Beatles’ concerts outside of their native United Kingdom were played. Both through black-and-white images of these events and through an extensive interview with broadcast journalist Larry Kane (who had the honour of accompanying the Beatles on every date of their first two US tours), Howard makes sure that you’ll appreciate that things weren’t simpler then. But for a while at least, it seemed that way for the Beatles, who rode on the rise of international teen culture during the time when the gigantic Post-World War II baby-boom generation was under 20 – after all, which other musician than the Beatles could have gotten away with racial mixing during that incendiary time in the United States?

Following the mantra of McCartney’s remark that ‘by the end, it became quite complicated; but at the beginning, things were really simple’, Howard juxtaposes context with the Beatles’ meteoric and unprecedented rise to fame in the United States –their landing at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, the press conferences, their hysteria-making American television debut on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’, and last but not least the storied Shea Stadium concert. Howard puts his audience right back into the centre of that cultural revolution which the Beatles were a centrifugal part of, how they suddenly mattered more than anything else happening in popular culture and how that took place on such a global scale. To do so, Howard has assembled notable celebrities such as Whoopi Goldberg, Sigourney Weaver and Elvis Costello to share their own Beatles-related anecdotes, with Goldberg’s story of how her mother surprised her with a Shea Stadium ticket probably the best.

Whereas these conversations add intimate insight to the younger generation who may know the music but not the era, they will no doubt resonate even more with those who grew up with the Beatles, for whom can relate personally to Weaver’s sentiment watching the group perform at the Hollywood Bowl in August 1964 that ‘I felt as much as a girl can feel’. But really, what better way to reminisce than the music itself, for which Howard’s film takes full advantage of being authorized by the group (the first in fact since their break-up in 1970); and make no mistake, there is plenty of delightful classic Beatles music here, mostly in the form of performance footage from a dozen concerts around the world featuring such familiar tunes as ‘She Loves You’ and ‘I Saw Her Standing There’. Even better is the roughly half-hour of restored bonus footage of the Shea Stadium concert in New York on Aug. 15, 1965, that sounds absolutely fantastic.

Because Howard has McCartney and Starr, there is no need for others to be talking about the members themselves. And through their talking heads, we hear of how the cheeky quartet from Liverpool had first seen their sudden (and somewhat unexpected) stardom as a game, how they reveled in that for some years, how that became a tidal wave which threatened to overwhelm them, how the endless touring soured the Beatles, as well as how Lennon’s controversial remark that they were ‘more popular than Jesus’ marked a turning point of the world’s love for them and for themselves. To be sure, there is no dirt here – meaning that you’ll won’t find McCartney or Starr saying anything bad about Lennon or Harrison and also that you’ll get the rock-n-roll without the ‘sex and drugs’ – but there is really nothing like hearing from the two surviving members themselves about how the band kept it together all those years by constantly coming back time and again to remind themselves about what was most important, i.e. the music.

Surely, that will likely also be first and foremost if you’re watching this Beatles documentary. Truth be told, it is somewhat disappointing that Howard doesn’t try to go deeper into the phenomenon, or tease out the dynamics between the Fab Four that would most certainly have changed during the touring years. Nevertheless, the music is key and the fact that Howard keeps coming back to it and the band’s delight in making it will make this a joy to watch for new and old fans of the Beatles alike. McCartney says in his interview: “By the end, it became quite complicated. But at the beginning, things were really simple”. How true that Beatlemania would have never been if not for the music at the heart of it – lest we forget, all these four teenagers from Liverpool wanted was to make great music, and that, no one can doubt they have accomplished supremely. 

Movie Rating:

(Notwithstanding that there isn't anything groundbreaking, Ron Howard's documentary on the Beatles is as good an opportunity as any to relive the great tunes and reminisce the cultural impact that their music had on the world)

Review by Gabriel Chong