I've been thinking -- and writing -- a bit about The Beatles lately, as the past few years have seen the 50th anniversary of their late-period albums -- "Sgt. Pepper," "The Beatles" (aka "The White Album"), "Abbey Road" and "Let It Be" have come and gone. Next week, Peter Jackson's "The Beatles: Get Back," the immersive and somewhat revisionist documentary series about The Beatles' final sessions will be released on DVD. (I've written about that for the Sunday newspaper.)
With The Beatles so much on my mind, I've decided to kick off my annual summer Lifequest summer movies series by going back to the start, to Richard Lester's remarkable "A Hard Day's Night," which was set over the course of 36 fictional hours in the life of the world's most famous rock 'n' roll band at the height of its popularity, with a soundtrack peppered with their music (including instrumental versions performed by "the George Martin Orchestra," which consisted of The Beatles' producer and classical sidemen).
While there is a tendency to overpraise the rediscovered artifact -- nostalgia interferes with any calm assessment. But in 2022, "A Hard Day's Night" holds up as an intensely pleasurable experience.
For those of us who remember The Beatles -- not the icons they became but the first jarring blast of cool fresh Beatlemania -- "A Hard Day's Night" is a reel of black and white and silver ghosts, a kind of trick mirror in which we can see how young we were and how old we have become. It is a chiaroscuro shadow play, an engagement of almost-forgotten-yet-naggingly-familiar dreams. It's deja voo doo.
IMPORTANT DOCUMENT
It seems silly to talk about something so featherweight and charming as this 1964 musical comedy as an important document, but that is what it has become. It is the source of the music video, and a remnant of nouvelle vague, with its four lead actors living for those mock French tilted cameras. It is a tumble of noise and image and if it doesn't seem quite so spontaneous and structureless as it did the first time we saw it, blame it on our jaded souls.
Lester, an American expatriate, had come to the attention of some critics with his grainy 11-minute short from 1959, "The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film," a collaboration with Peter Sellers. The "Can't Buy Me Love" segment in the film borrows stylistically from this short which pioneered the now common technique of cutting the images to the beat of the music. The "Can't Buy Me Love" sequence is an obvious precursor of MTV-style music videos, which led to some suggesting that Lester is the father of MTV.
The director wasn't impressed by that. In the mid '80s, when someone referred to him as MTV's daddy, he asked for a paternity test.
But whether or not "A Hard Day's Night" can be credited or blamed for MTV, it directly led to the idea for "The Monkees," a television sitcom that started out as four musicians-turned-actors portraying musicians in a struggling rock band. (While I would argue that the Monkees became one of the most important bands of rock 'n' roll's second generation -- their influence is hard to overestimate and their records, regardless of who was playing on them, are very good -- we will leave that discussion for another time.)
'A NEW GRAMMAR'
Even more importantly, with "A Hard Day's Night," Lester created what Roger Ebert called "a new grammar" of filmmaking that embraced quick cuts, obviously hand-held cameras and pop music playing over documentary (or faux documentary) action. "A Hard Day's Night" is a genuinely iconoclastic film, and it ushered in an identifiable modern pop style.
And while Lester saw "A Hard Day's Night" as a comedy, he also wanted to say something about the political and commercial power of the kids -- particularly the middle-class youth who formed The Beatles' core constituency. He also had the sense to recognize the band as something more than the latest craze and to allow their particular alchemy to infuse the film.
That's not to say The Beatles were simply naturals -- much of the credit for their droll and snappy dialogue goes to actor and playwright Alun Owen, who, though a generation older, had grown up down the street from where John Lennon lived in Liverpool. Owen wrote most of the lines The Beatles deliver, yet he knew them well enough to write for them. Some of the lines were echoes of -- or echoed in -- The Beatles' press conferences. It is a very Beatle-ly movie, regardless of whatever outside agencies may have contributed to the boys' assured performances as themselves. While they weren't, as some of the critics misleadingly commented at the time, "the new Marx Brothers," they were the defining pop phenomenon after Elvis in the last part of the 20th century. They were bloody special and "A Hard Day's Night" shows why.
AHEAD OF THE GAME
It isn't exactly as we remember it -- Lester's camera isn't quite so frantic and pushy as we remembered; after the opening scenes it settles down a bit, though there are a few wonderful overhead aerial shots and some of the chase scenes -- there are several -- are reminiscent of Truffaut. Lester was ahead of the game by recognizing the synesthesia between rock and television and cinema -- it seems that in every other shot the guys appear on TV monitors. When they sneak off to a disco they dance to their own music. It's all self-reflexive and insidery, to the point that one probably has to be a Beatle to get all the running in-jokes. (Look, John's pretending to snort something from a Pepsi bottle! What's that all about?)
While the experience of watching "A Hard Day's Night" today is necessarily different from 1964 -- we know how the story ends, we know that despite all expectations, The Beatles persist -- the film still has the power to convey a sense of innocence. It's a story about friendship, about the confounding and confusing nature of sudden fame. Lester cuts from The Beatles to their fans -- mainly adolescent girls screaming, with tears tracking their cheeks. What's that money can't buy?
All in all, it seems like a glorious accident, though there were safety rails. The film is buttressed by a couple of splendid performances by character actors Wilfred Brambell as Paul's rebellious grandfather and Victor Spinetti as a foppish television director. Their roles would have been larger had it turned out The Beatles couldn't act. And maybe they couldn't, but they -- and only they -- could be The Beatles.