My review was written after a July 1981 screening at Radio City Music Hall.
Edie and Ely Landau's filmization of the Broadway production "Beatlemania" is a low-budget, mildly diverting recall of the Beatles as a performing group and the '60s era in which they thrived. Pic lends itself to hoopla which should bring out the audience that liked the Winter Garden stage show, but beyond this it faces a tough sell as youthful fans have not supported performance films of late, preferring to attend live concerts.
Bookended by disclaimers which disassociate the film from the actual Beatles, picture is divided into eight segments, chronologically running through 30 Lennon-McCartney songs. Footage is divided between a film of a stage performance at the Long Beach Convention Center and lots of stock footage (simulating the use of back projections during the stage offering of protest marches, Vietnam war and personages of the '60s.
A small amount of live action (a dance number, comedy orchestra conductor, slow-motion tumblers), is also inserted to get away from just showing the Beatles imitators constantly. A headline crawl superimposed at the top of the screen alternates serious and silly topical events of the '60s.
Though the stock footage is an interesting recall of serious issues (and some fads) of the '60s, its juxtaposition with the music is often heavy-handed. Elaine May and Mike Nichols speak at a Selma-to-Montgomery, Alabama civil rights march, cuing shots of police violence against marchers while the lovely ballad "If I Fell" plays, an unfortunate choice.
Highlights of the pic are: "Got to Get You into My Life", played beautifully by the quartet with no cutaways or dissolves to distracting non-concert visuals, and "Magical Mystery Tour" played agaisnt hypnotic animated patterns. Absence of special visual effects hurts most of the psychedelic era material. "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" features Marvel Comics characters in still photos which cry out to be animated but are not.
The four carbons play Beatles music very well, with Mitch Weissman (encoring from the Broadway show) as Paul McCartney and David Leon as John Lennon looking amazingly like the real personages and simulating their stage personalities effectively. Ralph Castelli's version of Ringo Starr is okay while Tom Teeley does not resemble George Harrison physically until acquiring facial hair later in the film and he is given no song solos in the picture (unlike the stage show give gave the Harrison lookalike a couple of spots). Deafening crowd reactions are included on the Dolby stereo soundtrack in an attempt to generate "live' excitement.
The death of John Lennon is never referred to in the picture, since his fate and that of the other Beatles is irrelevant to the enterprise, No visual image of the actual Beatles is shown during the film and even Castelli's drum set bears the logo "Beatlemania" rather than "Beatles".
Since plenty of Beales footage exists on film, including the documentary "Let It Be", it is uncertain whether picture fans will want to see an imitation rather than the real thing. Tech credits are okay.
