A Hard Day’s Night



Starring the Beatles

Revolutionary in its time, does it hold up?
Mostly yes, yes it does.

Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night, from a script by Alun Owen, brought the Beatles to the big screen.
Paul and George were 21, John and Ringo 23 years old when this was filmed.

The film established public personae for them as well as a visual vocabulary for pop culture
iconography that has yet to be re-written or surpassed. There is still nothing else
in pop culture video to compare with that clanging first chord of the title track followed by
the sight of the Fab Four running down those black and white London streets.
(George falls! I still cringe! They still laugh hysterically at it.)

Apparently the movie was written after Owen spent a week or two tagging along
with the group as Beatlemania was hitting its stride in England.
John’s surrealistic dialogue scene with Anna Quayle – “You look just like him” “No I don’t” …stands out,
as does George’s sardonic interlude with the “taste-makers”.
Ringo’s rambles are fine and Paul is left pretty much doing nothing spectacular,
just being a pleasant team player and looking marvellous. (I will not editorialize on that.)

There is a story here – centred on the unattractive Paul’s grandfather character - but the bits
which highlight the Beatles themselves, their world and their music are certainly the best parts.
Most of the songs were written for the film, casually apparently, while on holiday in Barbados.

Established Brit actors – including the wonderful Victor Spinetti and less fab Wilfred Brambell –
were conscripted to help “the lads” carry a full movie.
Spinetti is brilliant as the neurotic TV producer. The backstage scenes of the variety show,
with high-plumed dancers squeezing through narrow hallways, are fun.

What the film captured even before it became crushing was the cooped-up existence they led
while on tour or doing group things. When Patty Boyd, the future Mrs. Geo. H then Mrs. E. Clapton,
pictured above as the schoolgirl utters her one line: ‘Prisoners!” it does describe their lives as a group.

This may be the first public utterance of One of the Reasons the Beatles Broke Up.

Watch it again for all the right reasons or discover it now as the exact place and time
that pop culture underwent a major shift into the future, affecting all levels of fashion,
birthing music videos, developing marketing ploys, and giving us in the pre-MTV,
pre-YouTube age our first real, extended look at the Beatles.

Who still look pretty darn peerless some 45 years later.

Recommended.