Directed by:
Robert ZemeckisCinematography:
Donald M. MorganCast:
Nancy Allen, Bobby Di Cicco, Marc McClure, Susan Kendall Newman, Theresa Saldana, Eddie Deezen, Christian Juttner, Will Jordan, Dick Miller, Newt Arnold (more)Plots(1)
On February 9, 1964, the Beatles made their first live appearance on American television on The Ed Sullivan Show, ratcheting up the frenzy of a fanbase whose ecstatic devotion to the band heralded an explosive new wave of youth culture. I Wanna Hold Your Hand looks back to that fateful weekend, following six teenagers, each with their own reasons for wanting to see the Fab Four, from New Jersey to Manhattan on a madcap mission to meet the band and score tickets to the show. With this rollicking first feature, director Robert Zemeckis and cowriter Bob Gale established themselves as a filmmaking team par excellence, adept at mining America’s cultural memory for comedy and adventure with a winning mixture of sweet nostalgia and playful irreverence. (Criterion)
(more)Reviews (3)
It’s crazy how one thing can make people so crazy that you can’t even look at them anymore. Robert Zemeckis made his first proper movie and I have to say it immediately got my attention. Not exactly the movie, but rather the Beatles’ music. It’s great, but it doesn’t make me go crazy like this. On the other hand, it was fun to watch the people during the whole Beatlemania, because what they did was often beyond the lines of common sense.
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I was going to label this film a calculated cashgrab targeting moms of the time who could reminisce about their younger years under Beatles posters at the movies, but then I read how it flopped. I Wanna Hold Your Hand has great scene choreography, pacing, and plenty of individual aspects worth highlighting (like the stunt performances by the female fans), but it's stretched too thin and foreshadows the problems I'll continue to have with Zemeckis and how he works with live actors as if they were animated characters. Incidentally, the ensemble cast here includes both the most beautiful (Susan Kendall Newman, Paul Newman's daughter) and the ugliest (Wendie Jo Sperber Bohdal) actresses of their time.
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Robert Zemeckis made a good movie about the Beatles without the Beatles. Sure, this is mostly about Beatlemania, but it's also about their music, which just still sounds as beautiful as when I first heard it. But it's interesting to see how much they drove people crazy, and not just the girls we mostly hear screaming at their concerts.
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