Tiffany's Shopping Range

Howard’s film follows the band from Ringo’s arrival in 1962 to their final paid live concert in 1966. Four lifetimes of live performance crammed into as many years, whittled down in turn to two hours of movie.

“We were force-grown, like rhubarb,” John Lennon laconically observes in one of many well-chosen snippets. It’s a line that chimes with every step Howard shows us the band taking – all the way to the recording of their transformative 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The film uncontroversially positions as the direct result of – and necessary push-back against – the exhilarating but punishing show-business whirl that led up to it.

A few seem like they’re there to give Howard’s largely US-centric film a more distinctive British flavour: it’s sweet that Richard Curtis feels his rom-com scripts owe a debt to the Beatles’ madcap early media personas, for instance, though it’s not clear why anyone watching this should be over the moon to hear it.

Beetles Influence

But others capture the breadth of the band’s influence without pulling focus from the phenomenon itself. Not least of all a brief word from Sigourney Weaver. Which the actress reminisces about a 1965 concert at the Hollywood Bowl. Over the top of contemporary news footage that grainily but unmistakably places her delighted 12-year-old self at the scene.

Other than obligatory signposts to epoch-defining events like the Kennedy assassination, there’s little historical context – but that’s because Howard understands the band is the historical context.

The phenomenon of their live appearances – not just the concerts themselves, but the cheeky press conference preludes, and the hysterical, garment-rending fallout – itself defines the era with a spiky precision.

Civil Rights Movement

The mid-century Civil Rights Movement becomes part of the story. For example, because the band’s manager Brian Epstein included a line in their touring contracts.  It specified the band would not play to segregated crowds.

Whoopi Goldberg, who was at the famous 1965 Shea Stadium gig, says she “never thought of them as white guys,” and describes them as “colorless” – one of a few trains of thought you wish Howard had allowed through a few more stations.

Likewise, the film shrewdly draws a line between the Beatles’ mischievous sense of humor. Their long-time producer George Martin’s earlier life recording alternative comedy. (Martin had worked with the Goons, an enormous influence on the band’s growing lyrical eccentricity in that period. As well as their off-the-cuff ribbing of strait-laced reporters.) But like many other ideas here, it’s tantalizingly flicked through, then shelved a little too early.

Vitally, though, the songs themselves get their due. Some appear in pleasingly unfamiliar forms. The film’s title track first turns up with Lennon and McCartney’s experimental oohed introduction, before segueing into its better-known version.

Plus there’s the straightforward pleasure of hearing the tracks play through a cinema sound system. – When Sgt. Pepper’s opening chords slam into your chest, the album really feels like an act of resuscitation.

What The Beatles did with the new lease of life that record gave them isn’t a matter for this film. But if Howard decides to address it in another, it’d be very welcome.

Courtesy:  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/2016/09/12/in-the-beatles-eight-days-a-week-ron-howard-shows-pop-history-at/