by Daniel Stephens

Created on: February 02, 2009   Last Updated: February 27, 2009

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'scomb. 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

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