A new Martin Scorsese Beatles movie explores the band’s triumphant 1964 U.S. visit

It’s February 1964. Beatles John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, fresh from their triumphant North American debut on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” are on a train bound for Washington, D.C., where they are to play their first U.S. concert.
An oh-so-serious journalist asks McCartney what impact he thinks the Beatles will have on Western culture.
“You must be kidding with that question,” McCartney scoffs. “It’s not culture, it’s a good laugh.”
He and the other Beatles were similarly dismissive of their fame a few days earlier, when they arrived at New York’s JFK airport from London to the sound of thousands of screaming fans. Shortly after, bemused and condescending journalists at a press conference demanded an explanation for the popular frenzy called Beatlemania, which had already broken out across Europe.
“If we knew, we’d form another group and be managers!” Lennon joked, as his bandmates roared with laughter.
The above scenes are from “Beatles ’64,” a documentary about the birth of Beatlemania in North America, which begins streaming Nov. 29 on Disney Plus.
Produced by Martin Scorsese and directed by his frequent collaborator David Tedeschi, “Beatles ’64” draws heavily from a rarely seen 1964 film, “What’s Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A.,” by Albert and David Maysles. The Maysles brothers, leading practitioners of the fly-on-the-wall documentary movement known as direct cinema, followed the band on their first American visit, a two-week trek that also included a stop in Miami.
“Beatles ’64” won’t astonish any longtime fans of the band. Although it boasts 17 minutes of unseen archival footage, plus newly restored performances from the group’s Washington concert and new interviews with surviving Beatles McCartney and Starr, much of this material has been seen before in innumerable news reports, documentaries and anthologies.
Revelations are few, apart from minor things like Starr disclosing that the only time he fell off his famous circular drum riser was at a concert in Canada (he doesn’t mention which city).
What does seem fresh is the feeling the doc rekindles, especially from the Beatles themselves, of a time when Beatlemania really was fun and “a good laugh,” as McCartney said.
Listen to Starr telling Scorsese what it felt like to be on the Pan Am jet descending into New York, bringing the Beatles, all in their early 20s, to the wild and musical city of their dreams. Their single “I Want to Hold Your Hand” had just hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
“I felt an octopus — I’m full of octopuses — grabbing the plane and bringing me down,” Starr says. “It was so great.”
“Beatles ’64” is short on narrative clarity and long on context and cultural connections — it even invokes communications guru Marshall McLuhan to explain the band — as it seeks to answer its own questions, many of them prompted by ancient news headlines that flash across the screen.
It tackles the “why” of Beatlemania that the Beatles cannily dodged. A news report in the film compares it to an outbreak of German measles that was also hitting New York in early 1964.
Vickie Brenna-Costa, a writer now in her 70s, tries to explain her “crazy love” for John, Paul, George and Ringo when she was a teen in ’64, standing for hours with the yowling mob outside the Beatles’ NYC hotel. She loved them, yeah, yeah, yeah.
“I can’t really understand it now, but then it was the natural thing to do,” she says.
Jamie Bernstein, the daughter of legendary conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, is another ex-teen Beatles screamer who is also a writer and septuagenarian. She says the band and its music summoned feelings in her she couldn’t fathom.
“It was so visceral, the reaction to the Beatles music,” Bernstein says. “It’s something we couldn’t explain in words. That’s why we screamed, because it was just coming out of some non-verbal place.”
McCartney, agreeing with a long-expressed theory the film opens with, speculates that the ecstatic American reception was in part prompted by the assassination two months earlier of U.S. President John F. Kennedy.
“Maybe America needed something like the Beatles to be lifted out of sorrow,” he says.
What ultimately emerges from the eclectic film, amusingly, is the Beatles getting almost as excited as their fans, without all the screaming. In ’64 they were clearly delighted to be the Fab Four, as they were often called. They’re repeatedly seen puffing on ciggies, reading newspaper accounts of their visit (including one written by future filmmaker Nora Ephron) and listening to a small plastic transistor radio, one bearing a Pepsi promotional label. They grin with mad excitement whenever a radio station plays “She Loves You” and other Beatles hits.
John, Paul, George and Ringo are endlessly obliging as they answer questions and deal with demands from the journalists crowding around them, including the ever-present Murray the K, a New York radio kingpin in a fur hat who declared himself “the fifth Beatle,” much to Lennon’s disdain.
Back then, it all seemed like a swirl of fun. “It was like being in the eye of a hurricane,” Lennon says in an archival interview. “It was happening to us, but it was hard to see.”
Nobody could imagine, least of all the band members, that in just two years they would mostly stop performing live together and cease touring completely, due to the pressure, fatigue and security concerns Beatlemania wrought.
In 1970, only six years after their arrival in New York, they’d split up bitterly, never to reunite as a quartet. And, in 1980, on those same New York streets, Lennon would be shot dead at age 40 by a crazed fan. (Harrison died of cancer in 2001 at 58.)
There were dark portents, even in ’64. Scottish photographer Harry Benson, now 94, who accompanied the Beatles on their first American tour, talks about the rude treatment the band members received at a British Embassy cocktail party in Washington. The ambassador and his wife welcomed the Beatles warmly, Benson says, but “the staff of the embassy treated them terribly. They were calling them ‘scruffs’ and the Beatles were in shock about it. … George Harrison was near tears.”
Benson also talks about Lennon’s prescient fears that Beatlemania might prompt someone like JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald to target them: “He would speak about the Kennedy assassination. He was a bit worried of violence here.”
Advance word on this documentary implied it would be mainly about the band’s Feb. 9, 1964, appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” before a studio audience of 728 and a TV viewing audience of an astonishing 73 million. There’s a lot about the Sullivan show here, but mostly it’s the preparation for it. The Beatles’ actual performance is seen only briefly and often through the eyes of fans, including one family, the Gonzalezes, who are seen watching the TV with rapt attention, moving in time to the beat.
The Beatles’ appeal transcended race and culture, as Motown icon Smokey Robinson says in the film, one of many I-was-there interviewees: “They were the first white group that I’d ever heard in my life who said, ‘Yeah, we grew up listening to Black music.’”
Also seen in “Beatles ’64” are selections from the band’s first full concert in America, on Feb. 11, 1964, from a boxing-ring stage at the Washington Coliseum. The grainy 16-millimetre footage has been remastered by Peter Jackson’s WingNut Studios, which did such a masterful job on “The Beatles: Get Back” documentary series in 2021. The music is produced by Giles Martin, who, in recent years, has been busily remastering the band’s studio recordings.
Late in the film, the early signs of Beatlemania fatigue start to show. On one of their long train rides along the eastern seaboard, Lennon and McCartney seem a little impatient with the ever-present throng of press and hangers-on. Harrison and Starr clown around, pretending to be a railway porter and cameraman, forcing a smile out of a bored McCartney, who rarely needs prompting.
“I’m not in a laughing mood even,” McCartney says, grinning at the antics.
It was like that in the Beatlemania days. The band members had to create not only their own amusements, but their own reality.
As Harrison says in an archival interview, filmed long after the fact: “We were kind of normal, and the rest of the world was crazy.”