Dunedin, I first saw A Hard Day’s Night at a film festival 20 years ago at my mother’s urging. By then, it was already decades old, but I remember being mesmerized by its high-spirited energy.
Being a Beatles fan, Mom introduced me to the band’s records when I was a child. At home, we would listen to the band’s 1963 single Please Please Me and the 1965 Rubber Soul album, which I loved.
The television regularly showed old black-and-white footage of Beatlemania, which seemed like ancient history to a ten-year-old in the neon-lit 1980s. But then again, I had never seen a full-length Beatles film. I had no idea what I was going to see.
When the lights went down at Dunedin’s Regent Theatre, the opening strains of the film’s title song announced its intentions: a burst of youthful exuberance, rhythmic visuals, comic twists and turns and the excitement of 1964’s Beatlemania.
This time, it didn’t look ancient at all.
Since that first viewing, I have returned to A Hard Day’s Night again and again. I now show it to my students as a historically important example of pop music filmmaking – a symbol of a new era in visually inventive cinema, youth culture, popular music, and fandom.
Beatlemania on celluloid
A Hard Day’s Night, the musical comedy depicting a turbulent 36 hours in the lives of the Beatles, has now reached its 60th anniversary.
Directed by Richard Lester, the film premiered in London on 6 July 1964, with its first public screening a day later, and the album of the same name was released on 10 July.
The band’s popularity had reached the height of hysteria at the time, which is also captured in the film. The Beatles are chased by hordes of fans, travel by train, appear on television, flee from the police in a Keystone Cops-style sequence, and perform a televised concert in front of real-life Beatles fans.
The first half of the album provides the soundtrack, and the film has since inspired pop music films and videos, from the Monkees TV series to the Spice Girls’ Spice World and music videos as we know it today.
Original music video
Post-war teen culture and consumerism had been growing since the 1950s. Youth music TV programmes in Britain in the 1960s, particularly Ready Steady Go!, meant that pop music now had a developing visual culture.
The youthful enthusiasm and vibrancy of ’60s London was reflected in A Hard Day’s Night’s pop-culture sensibility, modern satirical humor, and bold visual effects.
Influenced by French New Wave filmmaking, and in particular the work of Jean-Luc Godard in the early 1960s, A Hard Day’s Night uses cinéma vérité style hand-held cinematography, rapid jump cuts, unusual framing and dynamic angles, energetic action, and self-referential nostalgia.
The film also breaks the “fourth wall”, with characters directly addressing the audience in closeups, and exposes the mechanism of the musical’s visual performance: cameras and TV monitors are all part of the frame.
Cutting shots to the beat of the music – as in the Can’t Buy Me Love sequence – provided a visual rhythm that later became the norm in music video editing. Lester developed this technique further in the second Beatles film, Help!.
The closing scene of A Hard Day’s Night is perhaps the most dynamic scene in the film: photographic images of the band edited to the beat in the style of stop-motion animation. Sixty years later it still feels fresh, especially when contemporary filmmaking is still bound by the rules of Hollywood formula.
Slapstick and class awareness
Like much of popular culture of the past, the humor in A Hard Day’s Night isn’t always what it would have been in 1964. And yet, there are moments that feel surprisingly modern in their sharp irony.
In particular, the band’s Liverpoolian working-class-boy sarcasm and anarchic energy contrast brilliantly with the film’s upper-class characters. Actor Victor Spinetti’s comically over-anxious TV director, who constantly wrings his hands at the boys’ rebellious streak, underscores the era-defining change represented by the Beatles.
Corporate pop-culture consumerism is also satirized. John Lennon “snorts” from a bottle of Coca-Cola, a moment that is deliberately silly and seems more contemporary than reality. George Harrison deflects a reporter’s mundane questions with sharply witty replies, and criticizes a fashion company’s shirt designs as “grotesque”.
And Paul McCartney has a running joke that his grandfather – played by Wilfred Brambell in the groundbreaking sitcom Steptoe and Son – is “very neat”.
Even the film’s nostalgic visual spectacle holds up well into 2024. When showing the film to this year’s students, I didn’t expect them to burst out laughing so much when Ringo’s attempt to be chivalrous results in an accident.
In 2022, the Criterion Collection released a high-resolution restoration of the film, so today A Hard Day’s Night can be seen in all its fresh, black-and-white, youthful vigor.
Happy 60th birthday, A Hard Day’s Night. And happy 84th birthday, Ringo. Both are as vibrant and energetic today as they ever were. NSA NSA
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