Yeah Yeah Yeah

Excellent production, script, acting and what BRILLIANT music composed under the duress of filming and touring! John Lennon's tour-de-force (he wrote 11 1/2 songs on the album, Paul McCartney wrote half of "And I Love Her" and all of "Things We Said Today"). The script captures perfectly the joys and draining madness of Beatlmania. The Beatles prove in this film that they are deserving of the fame and adulation.

What can you say about the film that started it all? Where popular culture as we know it took shape in a "let there be light" Genesis kind of way? Where pop rock became worth listening and not just dancing to? Where John, Paul, George, and Ringo became firmly established as individual personalities as well as the premier entertainment troupe of the 20th century?

Only this: "A Hard Day's Night" is good, yes, and significant, but it's fun, too. Still, and above everything else, it's a lot of fun.

"A Hard Day's Night" is probably more responsible for the Beatles' enduring image in our culture than any single song they made. It came out in 1964, within a few short months of the Fab Four's sensational appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show that truly launched them globally, though they had been making great pop music for more than a year which was all the rage across Europe. "Hard Day's Night" captures the band when they were still relatively provincial and innocent, not yet in the "marijuana for breakfast" phase they were well into the following year when they made the zanier "Help!" LSD, Yoko, and the Maharishi were not even on the radar, nor was the psychedelic era the Beatles would usher in less than three years later. Finally "Hard Day's Night" clicked not only with the kids but the adults, who previously viewed the band as a motley band of overplayed haircuts. It gave all the generations of the time something they could agree on. These guys were good.

The story of "Hard Day's Night" is thin by design. We see the Beatles in slightly fictionalized form, with a manager named Norm and a roadie named Shake, traveling by train across England and ducking into a studio to make a TV appearance. Paul has his grandfather along, a codgy old troublemaker who nevertheless is "very clean." The irony of the movie is that the old guy, played by British TV star Wilfrid Brambell, is the one that continually ruffles the feathers of society while the Boys themselves play things fairly straight and legal.

Grandpa has the best take on the meager storyline: "I thought I was supposed to be getting a change of scenery, and so far I've been in a train and a room and car and a room and a room and a room!" Brambell works very well in the film, a needful focal point in a film that requires some bearings in order to work. Of the Beatles themselves, Ringo makes the strongest single impression by showcasing his vulnerable side while John probably has the best moments with his wacky, caustic humor. George shines, too, in a scene with a trend-happy fashion maven, and married one of the girls on the train in real life, so he did pretty well here, too.

Is it the best Beatles film? I think "Yellow Submarine" is better for what it's worth, but "Hard Day's Night" is the best film actually featuring the Beatles for who they were and what they were about.

Great music, too. The sequence on the train with "I Should Have Known Better" still works as a video, with all the baggage-car bric-a-brac thrown in for ambiance. Then there's "Can't Buy Me Love," which shows the Beatles in full-tilt boogie mode after momentarily escaping their studio confines. "And I Love Her" has some of the film's greatest camera work, very moody and intense in its focus on how well the Beatles worked in a TV studio setting.

As a film, "Hard Day's Night" lacks a bit of heart. Not that it's cold or cruel, just a trifle too detached to get enveloped by, the way one does with great cinema. I don't really miss the fact that "Help!" wasn't a true sequel; "Hard Day's Night" works for its 90-plus minutes but doesn't leave you wanting more. The relationships between the band members, and with Grandpa, Norm, and Shake, are left unexplored, and you don't really miss that as much as you maybe should.

But as a collection of small, witty moments interspersed with great music, "Hard Day's Night" is a pleasure through-and-through. Like the scene where John cuts the tailor's measure ("I now declare this bridge open") or has that absurd corridor chat with Anna Quayle ("She looks more like him than I do.") Or when Ringo tells the crotchety train passenger who complains he "fought the war for your sort" that "I bet you're sorry you won!"

I first saw this film way back in the day. Saw it, didn't hear or understand much of it, what with all those pubescent young females screaming their lungs out in the audience. When the young females were resting I had to contend with the Fab Four's Liverpudlian speech patterns which were as yet unfamiliar to me. Still very few soundtracks produced as many hits as did A Hard Day's Night.

As much as The Beatles themselves revolutionized popular music, A Hard Day's Night also was a revolutionary film of its own. What you're seeing here is nothing less than the first music video, albeit a rather lengthy 90+ minute one.

Director Richard Lester wisely eschewed the idea of a plot and basically did a docucomedy with songs about 12 hours in the life of John, Paul, George, and Ringo. They gave Paul a grandfather, played by Wilfred Brambell who when he wasn't getting into mischief on his own was influencing Ringo to spread his wings so to speak.

Will Ringo get back to the studio in time for the big Broacast? Actually 32 years before that in Paramount's The Big Broadcast the same was asked of straying Bing Crosby. Of course you know the answer.

A Hard Day's Night is must viewing for anyone who's trying to learn about the sixties. Or somebody who just likes the music of Paul McCartney and the lyrics of John Lennon.

"A Hard Day's Night" doesn't seem dated now, but it does seem familiar. We're used to all its madcap editing and photography now thanks to television and music videos, and we can only sit back and imagine (or try to remember) what it looked like through eyes that had never seen anything like it before. Watching it today, "A Hard Day's Night" still seems fresh and original, because it's still different (we're used to music videos, but not feature-length music videos), but to the 1960's audience it would have seemed entirely different from anything they had previously seen (especially if they were expecting a traditional rock musical, considering that the only good one of those made prior to this which I've seen is "Go Johnny Go").

Lester infuses the film with nonstop quick cutting and energetic pacing, giving the film an almost documentary-like feel (and somehow managing to integrate the biggest pop band in the world into the French 'nouvelle vague' style of film-making). When Orson Welles was interviewed in Playboy magazine in 1967 he said that the film directors that appealed to him the most were 'the old masters- by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford. With Ford at his best you feel that the movie had lived and breathed in the real world, even though it may have been written by mother Machree'. When questioned about younger directors he enjoyed the most he named Stanley Kubrick and Richard Lester.

It seems absurd after Kubrick's long and distinguished career and Lester's career which while featuring some famously good films, also includes "Butch and Sundance: The Early Days" (a cheap prequel with none of the original cast), and the notoriously horrible "Superman III" to compare the two directors, but looking at Welles' reasoning behind loving John Ford films, it all makes sense. "A Hard Day's Night" really does feel real, we are basically transported into a day in The Beatles' life and given a VIP pass to accompany them wherever they go. It's a fascinating adventure which the screenplay handles very well.

The Beatles were not actors, but they really come off as themselves because all they have to be is the cocky, wisecracking, and rather charming men they were in real life. The screenwriter is smart enough not to provide them with any real acting, which really helps the film. That's not to say there isn't any good acting in the film, quite to the contrary actually, since Wilfrid Bramble is hilarious as McCartney's grandfather and was presumably cast thanks to his very funny co-starring role on Britcom "Steptoe and Son", which was one of the shows I frequently watched as a kid (and was remade for American audiences as "Sanford and Son").

The film is effortlessly charming, relying on the Beatles' natural charisma to carry the film but also including enough wit to warrant comparisons to later great British comedies and also to the later Beatles films (including Lester's later, slightly funnier and more experimental "Help!"). The Beatles were not yet the musical innovators they would later become, but there's something I personally prefer about their simple, short, and perfect Merseybeat songs, especially those on this soundtrack, which contains some of the most joyous and memorable pop songs ever written.

9/10

The Beatles travel down from Liverpool to record a TV show.

If I was to meet Richard Lester I would shake his hand and thank him for recording the Beatles during the middle part of their career when they could entertain but hadn't yet shot off in to outer space. Without this we would have a piece missing from their history - and lets be frank - our history. They changed the world and all they had to change it with were electric guitars and their personalities!

The script is clever in that it showcases the personalities of the group without asking them to do much acting. Wilfred Brambell tags along to give comedy relief and the whole thing fits in plenty of songs that are good - but not as good as what soon followed. They are still tied to the Northern dance halls.

I have always thought that if they had a died in a car crash at this point they would be a mystery to the modern audience - hugely popular at the time - but not particularly stand-out from the other bands around. Like the way we regard Charlie Chaplin or Mary Pickford - both incredibly famous in their prime - but little regarded today.

Whether you like to admit it or not there are three geniuses at work and Ringo Starr. So I guess that it is fitting that Ringo comes across the best of the group: Down-to-earth, chatty, witty and willing to talk to anyone. Even the kids down by the river. John Lennon had a comic wit that could have given him another career had his music not been up to scratch. Talk about being master of the witty comeback.

Anyone watching this film will see London as it really was at the time. Not the swinging sixties that everyone pretends it was. Grubby shops, unpainted windows that look about to fall out of their frames, empty streets bar a few beat up cars.

I guess you could say this is the perfect record of Beatlemania: The driving beat songs (cranked out even quicker on stage), the backstage sieges, the ping-pong put downs that is the hallmark of English humour, the screaming that overpowered the performance. Enjoyable at the time (as light entertainment) it becomes an important historical document now and every generation should see it. Your pop culture education depends on it.