‘The Beatles: Eight Days A Week — The Touring Years,” directed by Ron Howard (“A Beautiful Mind,” “Apollo 13”), is a thoroughly delightful, crisply edited film that takes viewers to Europe, Australia, the Far East and the U.S. where, from June 1962 and August 1966, the Fab Four played 90 cities in 15 countries.
You’ve already seen much of this footage — “The Ed Sullivan Show,” the dashes to escape screaming fans, the famous descent from the plane to the tarmac, the witty comebacks at news conferences — but by using home-movie footage in hotel rooms and fly-on-the-wall tape from the studio control room, Howard’s film often succeeds in making you feel it all from the four lads’ astonished point of view.
As John Lennon says in one of his funniest rejoinders, if the band knew why people were so crazy about them “we’d form another group and become managers.”
Along with the talk — a lot of it from Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr — comes the concert footage, including a knockout “Twist & Shout” (Manchester, 1963) and a rendition of “Help” (Blackpool, 1965) that showcases the quartet’s ineffable coordination of a disarmingly honest lead lyric, euphonious answer harmonies, explosive guitar licks and locomotive drums.
