“A Hard Day’s Night” Turns 60

It’s instructive to measure off anniversaries. Four years ago I wrote a piece noting the 60th anniversary of the “Birth of the Beatles”. Brian Epstein began to manage them a year after that. And a mere three years following, their first motion picture feature A Hard Day’s Night (1964). Some have criticized some of the financial deals Epstein cut, but I’m sorry, this is good management.

Influenced by the French New Wave and British Kitchen Sink Drama, Richard Lester’s clangly, jangly, jump-cut jiujitsu made the movie vehicles of Elvis and lesser pseudo-Elvises like Pat Boone,Fabian, Bobby Darin, etc. look like the services of a very stodgy church. It still packs a punch as far as I’m concerned. I never watch it without wanting to leap out of my chair with excitement. This in spite of the fact that it came out a year and a half before I was born! I had the excitement of first seeing the movie in a cinema during its 1982 re-release. By that point, I was a Beatles fan of several years standing, much less interested in the pop music of my own time than the British Invasion of the early ’60s.

A Hard Day’s Night was superlative in every single way: cinematography, editing, screenplay (penned by Liverpool playwright Alun Owen). The film ranked second only to Dr. Strangelove in the Village Voice‘s first annual critics poll in 1964. There was a stellar supporting cast including Norman Rossington (of A Night to Remember and the Carry On comedies) as their fictional manager Norm; Irish actor Wilfrid Brambell (star of the sitcom Steptoe and Son, the show on which Sanford and Son was based) as Paul’s fictional “clean” grandfather; lumbering John Junkin as the fictional road manager Shake (this name always reminds me of Shakespeare’s Rude Mechanicals); and the immortal Victor Spinettias a TV director constantly on the verge of a nervous breakdown. A couple of the hot, mod Carnaby Street chicks in the film were notable. These include model Patti Boyd, who became Mrs. George Harrison in short order in the wake of this film; Margaret Nolan, another model, who played “Dink” in the James Bond film Goldfinger that same year; and future movie star Charlotte Rampling. One of the kids dancing in the night club scene was Jeremy Lloyd, later of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-in.

Plot? We don’t need no stinking plot! It’s just the Beatles running around being chased by girls, getting in and out cars and hotel rooms and rehearsal studios and so forth, traveling by train, limousine, and helicopter. The only stakes are: “Will Ringo Make It To The Studio in Time for the Big Live TV Special?” The saving grace is that it is a visual and aural feast. You can’t think about it without picturing those gritty black and white images of train compartments and brick alleyways, or quoting the film’s 100 quotable lines (spoken in those irresistible scouse accents).

And (the elephant in the room) the songs. That’s why we’re there after all, right? On top of everything else, the Beatles’ music turned a corner with the soundtrack to this album. The title song, with its witty title (inspired by a Yogi Berra style malaprop by Ringo) and its mysterious, dissonant opening chord (a source of controversy among musicians to this day) sets the stage for the experimentalism of the coming years. The other dozen songs on the record were all Lennon–McCartney compositions, a first for the band, whose earlier two LPs had included several covers. George Harrison’s use of a 12 string guitar on several songs influenced The Byrds and other groups, as folk rock started to take off. The fast-moving title song and “Can’t Buy Me Love” went to #1 on the pop charts. There was also John’s harmonica driven “I Should Have Known Better”, the manic “Tell Me Why”, and several Paul ballads including “If I Fell”, “And I Love Her” and “All My Loving”. George sings the bubble gum “I’m Happy Just to Dance With You” and we hear a snatch of his own composition “Don’t Bother Me” off a previous album. Uncharacteristically there is no song for Ringo to sing. Instead he is assigned his own theme song “This Boy”, played in an instrumental version over his dramatic interlude by the riverside. “I’ll Cry Instead” was cut from the final picture but used in a special prologue devised for that 1982 release I mentioned.

A Hard Day’s Night is so good, one wants many more similar Beatles movies. But as with the Marx Brothers (with whom the Beatles were often compared) their cinematic excursions were way too few. In the case of the Beatles, you can count their movies on one hand. Inconceivable as it may be to the fans who love this movie, as joy-filled as it appears, the Beatles’ hearts weren’t in it. They were musicians. At best, they dabbled in acting/performing. Ringo was the one who took it the most seriously. Praised for his Chaplinesque pathos in a couple of scenes in A Hard Day’s Night, he went on to appear in over a dozen movies by himself after the band broke up. The worst actor of the bunch was, somewhat surprisingly, Paul McCartney, some of whose self-conscious line readings in the film are cringe-inducing. Of the other two, Lennon shone as a zany comedian in the tradition of Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan, and Harrison was praised by Richard Lester as the best of the bunch in terms of nailing every take with his intense, focused, deadpan Liverpool delivery. But the latter two resented the phoniness of film-making. In A Hard Day’s Night (and in Help! as well) they played fictional versions of themselves, which felt inauthentic to them. And the commercial nature of the movie business dictated a tonal approach that would appeal to the masses, which was squarely at odds with the idea of “cool” prized by rock musicians. They must have gotten an earful of ribbing from their colleagues. Bands like Gerry and the Pacemakers and Herman’s Hermits followed in the Beatles’ footsteps with cutesy-pie narrative films. The Rolling Stones and The Animals did not.

For an interesting look at several movies the Beatles considered making, but did not, go here. The screen void left by their decision to focus on records like Revolver and Sgt. Pepper was immediately filled by The Monkees, and later by even more artificial kid-oriented fodder likeThe Archies and Josie and the Pussycats(the Beatles’ own Saturday morning cartoon show also having passed from the scene). Still later, there were The Bay City Rollersand The Hudson Brothers, one of whom later went on to produce several of Ringo’s solo records. But honestly the reason so many people STILL obsess about the Beatles is that to this day — 60 years later — no pop act has ever come remotely close to replicating anything on the order of this landmark entertainment excursion. We haven’t been back to the moon yet, either.