Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Five years before Apollo 11 touched down on the Moon, aliens landed at New York’s JFK airport. At least, that’s how four strangely groomed Scousers appeared to many onlookers as they first set foot on American soil. “They could have been from Mars,” the critic Joe Queenan recalls.The story of The Beatles’ arrival in the US has been mythologised perhaps more than any other episode in the band’s history, the transcript of their inaugural bantering press conference by now almost as recitable as the lyrics to “Love Me Do”. And yet the existence of Beatles ’64, a new film released to mark the 60th anniversary of the tour, suggests there’s still more to be said after all these years.Produced by Martin Scorsese and directed by David Tedeschi, the Disney+ special promises an “intimate” telling of the tale. It’s built around freshly restored behind-the-scenes footage — shot by American filmmakers Albert and David Maysles — and present-day interviews with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr. Yet from the introductory montage of early-1960s milestones set to a soft, balladic cover of “All My Loving”, to the parting message from McCartney to the late John Lennon and George Harrison, the documentary seems more interested in nostalgia than revelation.There are effusive tributes from an ensemble of musical contemporaries as well as erstwhile adolescent fans turned cultural figures. Smokey Robinson and Ronald Isley speak warmly of the band’s embrace of Black music, while feminist scholar Jane Tompkins celebrates their rejection of masculine norms. Others talk reverentially about The Beatles’ simultaneous transcendence and relatability. A general lack of focus, however, means that McCartney and Starr make only fleeting cameos, sharing brief, slightly impersonal anecdotes.If the interviews can be frustratingly slight and familiar, the revitalised Maysles’ brothers footage is a delight. Clips of the band loafing around in a hotel are obviously never quite as electrifying as the studio scenes from Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back, but they still provide an entertaining chronicle of what it was like to be a Moptop beyond the hysteria.We see them both as rambunctious boys — teasing American accents, running down hallways — and wry stars handling media commitments with ironic detachment. We witness their bemusement in the face of fervid fandom, and the boredom of being sequestered in a hotel as hordes of screeching teens loiter outside. And though they’re always conscious of the camera, there’s nothing they say or do that feels like it’s for a future archive so much as their own in-the-moment amusement.McCartney recalls the tour with well-earned self-seriousness, suggesting at one point that The Beatles helped “lift [America] out of mourning” after the assassination of President Kennedy a year earlier. But at the time, none of them seemed to be considering the wider sociopolitical significance of their presence. Asked by a reporter back then to comment on the band’s impact on culture, McCartney gives a typically understated answer — one that now serves as a poignant reminder of what changed after 1964 as their music got more complex and the relationships more fraught. “It’s not culture,” he says. “It’s a good laugh”.★★★☆☆On Disney+ from November 29
