Scottish Daily Mail

Do you want to know a secret? This new Beatles film is FAB!

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The Beatles: Eight Days A Week — The Touring Years ★★★★✩

On Tuesday evening I went to see the inaugural screening of Ron Howard’s documentar­y The Beatles: eight days a Week — The Touring years. Howard was there, and introduced his film by saying that he approached the project with the mantra, and I paraphrase very slightly: ‘don’t muck it up!’

everyone knew what he meant. ‘national treasure’ might have become a hackneyed phrase, but there are very few internatio­nal treasures.

That’s what The Beatles were, still are, and a film-maker telling their story has a duty to protect as well as project it.

Howard has done just that. With the help of some obvious talking heads (Paul McCartney, Ringo starr), and some less predictabl­e ones (actresses sigourney Weaver and Whoopi Goldberg, both of whom, as wide-eyed girls, went to Beatles concerts), he tells a familiar tale with a surprising and at times thrilling amount of originalit­y.

even as a fan, whose Merseyside childhood had a Beatles soundtrack, there is plenty of material here that I had never heard or seen before. I thought I’d watched every clip, cherished every quip.

But Howard has found some marvellous footage in private archives, and woven it together meticulous­ly. The story of how Beatlemani­a first energised them on those endless tours but eventually sucked them dry, has been told before. I feel like I know the faces of some of those screaming girls at the ABC cinema, Manchester, as well as I do those of John and Paul.

nonetheles­s, eight days a Week is a perfect title. It conveys how relentless­ly they had to be on duty as The Beatles, especially from 1962 to 1966, when they resolved never to go on the road again. That was after playing to 56,000 at new york’s shea stadium, including the devoted Whoopi Goldberg, who had been taken as a surprise by her mother, and recalls the sudden realisatio­n of where they were going making her head ‘explode’.

The film is unashamedl­y tailored for an american audience. Howard tries to set the touring years in a socio-political frame, which for him is an exclusivel­y u.s. context: Kennedy’s assassinat­ion, civil rights, Vietnam. This doesn’t entirely work, but it’s a small price to pay for a lot of pure pleasure.

The film opens here on September 15.

 ??  ?? Pure pleasure: Mop Tops Ringo, George, Paul and John in Sweden, 1963
Pure pleasure: Mop Tops Ringo, George, Paul and John in Sweden, 1963

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