I Wanna Hold Your Hand (Robert Zemeckis, 1978) August 5, 2006
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Comedy, 1970s, Desert Island Films, Drama, Film reviews , trackback
It’s 1964 and the Beatles are about to play the Ed Sullivan show. Fans are flocking to their hotel to get a glimpse of their idols and six friends from New Jersey are about to do the same, but they have much grander plans. Rosie (Wendie Jo Sperber) is a Beatles fanatic who is desperate to get into their hotel just to get close to Paul McCartney, while aspiring journalist Grace (Theresa Saldana) wants to do the same thing knowing if she can get a picture of them, up close and personal, she’s got a shot at the big time. Pam (Nancy Allen) gets dragged along too but after she splits up from Rosie and Grace, she hides in a food cart and finds herself in the Beatles room with free reign to Paul’s bass guitar and John’s…comb. Tony (Bobby Di Cicco), a Beatles hater, and Janis (Susan Kendall Newman), a protester, come along just to cause trouble, while Larry (Marc McClure) is there only because he’s in love with Grace, but the whole gang soon finds themselves having one mishap after another, as the clock quickly ticks down to the Beatles first ever U.S television performance.
I Wanna Hold Your Hand is the debut film of director Robert Zemeckis and the first feature that Bob Gale and Zemeckis worked on together (although they did write Spielberg’s 1941 around the same time, but that film was not be released until 1979). It’s a movie that shows off many of the traits and inspirations that would make their most notable collaboration Back To The Future so great, and it’s a debut that is certainly better than its poor box-office would have you presume. Sharing a similarity with George Lucas’ American Graffiti, it tells the story of some friends who come of age and have a great time doing it, but Zemeckis gleefully pays homage to the Three Stooges and the Marx brothers, styling his film in a much lighter tone than Lucas, concentrating on the brighter side of their misadventures. It’s a terrifically funny film, and once again the two Bob’s prove they are masters of the screenplay, creating some wonderfully well-rounded characters that sucker you in with their adolescent innocence and manic desperation to achieve their goals.
Certainly Zemeckis relies on his characters, and to a certain extent caricatures, to carry the film as the plot is fairly arbitrary, and it’s Richard ‘Ringo’ Klaus (Eddie Deezen) who stands out. This Beatles obsessive is played with such kinetic energy by Deezen, he’s thoroughly captivating to watch, encapsulating manic Marxism’s with a brilliantly strange fascination with all things Beatle – we meet him as he tears up the hotel carpet which the Beatles have just walked on. Later he shows Rosie a section of grass he claims the Beatles have stood on, saying, ‘This is actually a clump of grass that Paul stepped on. I’m not exactly sure which blade he stepped on, but it’s all in there. That’s why I got such a big clump.’ Deezen is a revelation but it’s a shame he doesn’t get more screen time as he steals every scene he’s in. Nevertheless, Nancy Allen is dependable in her role and she’s in one of the film’s best scenes when she hides under the bed and the Beatles come into the room. All we see is their distinctive shoes and half their legs pottering around, with voice actors imitating Paul, John, Ringo, and George perfectly, yet the scene works wonderfully as her idols are mere inches away yet she’s too afraid to alert them to her presence. Wendy Jo Sperber is also great to watch, as she’s a sort of toned-down, female version of Deezen’s Richard, and Zemeckis has the pair getting up to all kinds of trouble, from problems in a lift shaft, to trying to escape from the security staff, their madcap obsessive enthusiasm is simply a joy to see.
I Wanna Hold Your Hand is a very enjoyable film, and while it isn’t as refined as Zemeckis’ later films (it starts off quite slowly, and never really gets going until a quarter of the way through), it has a sense of youthful energy that makes it exceedingly endearing. It’s packed with some delightful vignettes (a rebellious kid is disgruntled at his father for making him cut his Beatles style hair so enlists the help of Janis to steal Ed Sullivan tickets off him; Grace overhears a businessman ordering a prostitute over the phone so takes her place to blackmail him into giving her enough money to get into the TV show; and Pam ends up being as idolised as the band themselves when the fans hear she was in their room), and of course the soundtrack is fantastic, packed with Beatles songs from their pre-1965 catalogue. There’s plenty to like, Zemeckis capturing the Beatlemania hysteria that hit the United States in 1964 with a genuine authenticity that superbly captures the time period, and beautifully renders the social implications of the public’s fascination with the popular-culture that surrounded them. It’s funny and it’s sincere, but above all it’s a great little time capsule for a place and period of unusual optimism.
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