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This is it. There has never been and never will be another band like the Beatles. The innocence of the generation is showcased in A Hard Day's Night. The perfect musical for any audience, the Beatles capture a time that can never be repeated. Like 4 childhood friends knowing that the Old can never get them down, they represented everything good and right of the world. They reflected the generation that wanted to be heard. Almost 40 years later, they are still as young as ever. Timeless, beautiful, true. A Hard Day's Night is perfection!

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.

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 Days Night" has got to be one of the funniest movies of all time, firmly holding its place with such classics as "Annie Hall" and "Duck Soup". It is also one of my top five favorite films of all time. The film proved that the Beatles could not only write and perform incredible songs, but that they could act as well. They are assisted in no small part by the extraordinary screenplay by Alun Owen. His dialogue is so unreasonable witty that even Groucho Marx himself would be impressed.

In "A Hard Days Night", we not only see the Beatles as great characters, but we also get some other outstanding characters, such as Paul's mischevious grandfather (Wilfred Brambell) and the dim-witted Norm and Shake (Norman Rossington and John Junkin).

This is a great film with great music and a great screenplay. I recommend this not only to avid Beatles fans, but to movie fans in general.

"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