A HARD DAY’S NIGHT
Still fab after all these years
THAT FIRST CRASHING chord of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ is a starter’s pistol. Outside Marylebone station (pretending to be Liverpool), The Beatles run at the camera, pursued by fans. In a vérité bit, George stumbles and Ringo trips over him. John takes a moment to note his mates in danger of being trampled and smirks (bastard!), while Paul nimbly makes what seems as likely to be a lynching as a love-in seem a jolly wheeze. Before the title song’s middle eight, director Richard Lester has let The Beatles establish their screen characters and set a hectic pace.
The 40 or so extras dogging the Fab Four’s heels are just a hint of the Beatlemaniac multitudes of contemporary newsreels. Only in the concert finale does Lester convey the terrifying exhilaration of the band’s overwhelmingly teenage, female fans — with repeated zooms towards the sobbing blonde girl the editors nicknamed ‘the White Rabbit’. The Beatles sign off with what was then their (and, it seemed, anyone’s) biggest hit, ‘She Loves You’. Its catchy, easy-to-caricature “yeah, yeah, yeah” refrain is an affirmation that can also sound like Liverpudlian contempt. The subliminal sting of “you know you should be glad” hints at a dissatisfaction with the baggage of ‘being The Beatles’ that keeps them on the run throughout the film. No wonder they’d later sing ‘Help!’ and ‘Helter Skelter’.
Lester had worked with Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers in experimental TV comedy and later dashed off It’s Trad, Dad!, one of the ‘jukebox movies’ The Beatles wanted to avoid making. He was embarking on a run of creativity that held up about a decade longer than theirs. His Musketeers films — starring another constantly pursued foursome — are a clear development of A Hard Day’s Night, down to a supporting cast studded with British comedy/character greats. Shot in black-and-white in not-yet-swinging London locations, A Hard Day’s Night is an eruption — British austerity and kitchen-sink realism is pecked from the inside like an egg, and out hatches surrealism, anarchy, teenage revolt and a new social order. With a chart-topping soundtrack album.
Charged with the task of making a Beatles film — any Beatles film — inside three months, Lester opted for a pseudo-documentary about a day on tour. TV writer Alun Owen provided pithy insults as the lads clash with a variety of non-beatles who will never be in on the joke. Bite-sized scenes with pros like Anna Quayle and Wilfrid Brambell (playing Paul’s grandfather) force The Beatles to underplay, shrugging off their own near-tragic absurdity. “Are you a mod or a rocker?” asks Marianne Stone — Kubrick’s Vivian Darkbloom in
Lolita — only for Ringo to deadpan aptly, ‘“I’m a mocker.” Later, a girl tells a disguised Ringo to, “Get out of here, Shorty,” and he’s relieved at honest contempt after so much fawning. Vestigial plot points (Ringo goes walkabout before the TV show) string together proto-pop video fooling about, a parade of every-one-a-winner hits, and jokes which land like jabs. “I fought the war for your sort,” snarls a military man (Richard Vernon) on a train, incensed that louts have usurped a first class compartment. “Bet you’re sorry you won,” snarls Ringo, before the group retreat to the cramped luggage compartment to play a card game that segues into ‘I Should Have Known Better’ performed to a couple of schoolgirls who poke fingers through the lads’ cage as if to stroke hamsters.
The exuberance is tinged with menace. In retrospect, reality slaps the film in the face when an exasperated tour manager (Norman Rossington) tells John Lennon, “Behave yourself or I’ll murder you!” And there’s an uneasy vein of homophobia in put-downs of gay or camp stereotypes — an ad man (Kenneth Haigh) out to package the phenomenon, a TV director in an outrageous sweater (Victor Spinetti) — with John in particular prone to, “Ooh, Ducky,” sneers. When the pressure becomes too much — “I thought I was supposed to be getting a change of scenery but so far I’ve been in a train and a room and a car and a room and a room and a room,’” complains Grandad, echoing John’s real-life description of his Swedish tour as “a room and a car and a car and a room and a concert and we had cheese sandwiches sent up to the hotel” — the group flee through a forbidden fire escape to ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ and run riot in a field, poised in cinema history half-way between Buster Keaton chased by cops and Danny Boyle’s fast-running zombies.
At the end, The Beatles — sweaty, dazzled, polite, relieved — take a bow… but it’s not over. This is a film about beginning, setting the tone for everything from The Dave Clark Five in Catch Us If You Can and Bob Dylan in Dont Look Back to This is Spinal Tap and Spice World: The Movie. Decades — and successive pop fads — on, it’s still vibrant with potential and excitement.
A HARD DAY’S NIGHT IS OUT NOW ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND DOWNLOAD