Rent The Beatles: The Early Years (2007)

Watchable but poorly made - The Beatles: The Early Years review by AH

This has a good set of interiews to it, but it's poorly made. The sound and dialogue of the interviews is constantly drowned out by the background music or the side by side footage of the beatles playing the Ed Sullivan show. This is meant to be about the early years with Pete Best, yet even as the man himself is talking about playing in Hamburg and coming back to Liverpool, he's saying it as footage of The Ed Sullivan with Ringo is playing. He talks about business contracts and going back to Hamburg, the interview with him taking up half the screen and there's photos overlaying the other half of the screen of Ringo from the late 60s, They talked about the dekker performance, none of that got played. Worst I think is the details the subtitles got wrong, and the mistakes with the people interviewed going uncorrected. Tony Barrow's name is written as Tony Brarrow every time he's interveiwed, he talks about Eddie Cochrane dying and then says about having to do the concert without the other fellow on the bill who was still performing, nstead of Eddie Cochrane, and there are mix ups over Ringo and Andy White's performances in regards to who performed on the singles and who performed on the album footage. I know it's natural to verbally get these things mixed up, but it's then up to the documentary maker to correct any mistakes in production with subtitled inlays.

So it was an enjoyable watch, it was good to hear Pete Best's side of things for someone like me who'd never heard his side of things before, and a good recap of the manager history, plus how things kept going wrong for them. But it was sloppily made, and you have to be aware of that when watching. There are better short docs about The Beatles than this.