The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years

Howards documentary is candid and enlightening. It walks us through a short three year period that bustles with activity, from the very first tours to Germany to the American tours and filming of A Hard Days Night and Help! Its an age old story now, one that has been retold many times so that certain points have reached the status of fable, such as Lennons comments about the band being bigger than Jesus, but theres distance in the years now and seeing Paul and John attempt to articulate these events five decades apart is oddly touching. Petty squabbles are left out, and as such the documentary is perhaps a tad over glossy, but it doesnt particularly matter. This is a film about that once in a century flash of mania that captured the worlds eyes and ears. The weirdness of four young men being shuttled around America to the adulation of thousands of teenage fans is only explored in Larry Kanes musings at the time, and in his vox pops here, but its heartening to see the band refuse to play between apartheid crowds. In its own way, it's an interesting commentary on contemporary events, with the jovial drive of the Beatles contrasting against the far more saccharine yet manufactured pop idols of today, and it's hard to imagine a modern artist being so staunchly political, exemplified here by The Beatles refusal to play to segregated crowds.