‘The girls didn’t stop screaming’: When Beatlemania hit suburban theaters 60 years ago

With George Harrison’s opening guitar chord, hysteria enveloped American movie theaters 60 years ago Monday.

The premiere of “A Hard Day’s Night” at 500 theaters nationwide only served to build the anticipation of the film’s release weeks later in the Chicago area, coinciding with the Beatles’ North American tour that included a Sept. 5 stop at the International Amphitheatre.

Beatlemania was in full swing in America’s heartland.

Kathy Roche McCoy, then 9, was among the hundreds of youth who packed into the old Arlington Theatre in downtown Arlington Heights for its suburban premiere on Friday, Sept. 11.

Shot in cinema vérité style, the musical comedy follows several days in the lives of the group, from parties to preparations for a TV performance.

“I got in there, and from the moment the film started, the screaming was so loud that you couldn’t discern any of the dialogue,” McCoy said. “I mean, some of those girls behaved as if they were really there.”

Larry Andres, then 13, also was at the first showing.

“We stood in line. I remember the line stretched down Evergreen (Avenue) in front of the theater, around the side, and went all the way down Arlington Heights Road,” said Andres, a retired Buffalo Grove Fire Department lieutenant. “The girls didn’t stop screaming. They screamed from the moment the movie started until the movie ended. You couldn’t hear a thing. You couldn’t hear the lines to the movie. Every time the Beatles opened their mouths, the girls screamed.”

Indeed, the Arlington Heights Herald — then a weekly publication that was the predecessor to the Daily Herald — described the spectacle this way: “The seats were full, and screams were the order of the evening.”

“BEATLEMANIA,” the newspaper declared, “is not restricted to large metropolitan centers such as New York and Chicago.”

The Arlington Theatre, Des Plaines Theatre and York Theatre in Elmhurst were among suburban showplaces that sold advance tickets for the Beatles’ film debut, according to the Herald’s movie listings. That was rare at the time.

One listing shows Arlington’s admission for “A Hard Day’s Night” was $1, though regulars like Andres — who became a movie buff by attending weekly flicks with his grandfather — remembers kids’ prices being as cheap as a quarter.

A bag of popcorn was 15 cents, he recalls.

The movie opened in Chicago on Aug. 28 at the Woods Theatre in the Loop. Eddie Silverman, the theater owner, had parking valets wear moptop wigs on opening day.

A Herald movie listing shows the film also premiered that night at a suburban drive-in. The ad for Starview Outdoor Theatre — at Route 20 and Route 59 near Streamwood — proclaimed: “The Beatles starring in their first full-length, hilarious, action-packed film! 6 brand new songs plus your Beatles favorites!”

Other venues showing the movie as of Sept. 11 included the Oasis Drive-In on the Des Plaines/Elk Grove Village border and the Mount Prospect Cinema, where the co-feature was Elvis Presley’s “G.I. Blues.”

Back at Arlington and Des Plaines, “A Hard Day’s Night” double-billed with Bobby Vinton’s “Surf Party.”

One Hoffman Estates mother told the Herald in 1964 that she counted ringing ears and a pounding head “just part of the price of motherhood” as she took her 10-year-old daughter and friends to see the Beatles movie.

After the screaming died down, some returned to their local theaters to watch the movie a little more closely. Andres says he’s re-watched it many times over — the first of five major motion pictures the band appeared in — believing the films still “hold up” decades later.

“The Beatles movies were good movies. They weren’t just fluff. They were done really well. It’s very artistic,” Andres said.

Debbie Venezia, executive director of the Wheaton-based After Hours Film Society, agrees. Her group has screened the film three times over the course of the nonprofit’s 35-year span, including last month at the Tivoli Theatre in Downers Grove.

The irreverent, 87-minute documentary-style presentation is peppered with the Beatles’ one-liners, quips and a dozen of their original songs. Venezia and other critics credit the movie as being an early inspiration to what became the music video.

“There’s something so enlivening about watching them and seeing their youth, watching it as a much older person now,” said Venezia, a Beatles fan who first saw the movie as a little girl at the DuPage Theatre in Lombard. “And you see they have that charisma, they have that vitality. They weren’t manufactured. (They were) a natural talent musically and personality-wise. They were themselves.”

The band members push boundaries and challenge authority throughout the movie, despite their manager’s efforts to keep them in tow. In one scene, Ringo Starr wanders off from the recording studio and finds himself in trouble with the law. In another, the band runs down the stairs of a fire escape into an open field to sing “Can’t Buy Me Love” — only to be scolded later that they’re on private property.

“They broke the rules, but they didn’t harm anybody,” Venezia said.

McCoy, then an elementary school student at St. James School in Arlington Heights, got her first record, “Rubber Soul,” a year after seeing the Beatles’ first movie. She remembers how different it sounded “than what was playing on my parents’ hi-fi.”

“It was just a coming of age,” she said. “In that way, it was revolutionary.”

https://www.dailyherald.com/20240811/music/the-girls-didnt-stop-screaming-when-beatlemania-hit-suburban-theaters-60-years-ago/