A Hard Day's Night. (PG.)
Directed by Richard Lester. 1964.
Starring John, Paul, George, Ringo, Norman Rossington, John Junkin and Wilfred Brambell. Black and White. 87 mins
It was fifty years ago today, Richard Lester told the band to play. And run about. And pull funny faces. Made at the height of Beatlemania their first film captured them at a stage of their career when they were still really just a teenybopper band. If they'd called it quits after this, it's just possible that they'd be largely forgotten today, in which case Hard Day's Night would be viewed as a piece of tiresome Sixties narcissism, rather than the hallowed classic it is today.
Spinning the conceit that the Fab Four were really just a gang of mischievous school kids forever getting into scrapes, the whole film is them running away from gangs of girls that like them, hitting on other girls who they never quite click with and trying to elude the control of their manager (Rossington) who at one stage drags them out of a nightclub to make them go back and do their homework – answering fan mail. They also have to take care of Paul's surprisingly clean grandfather (Brambell) and have run-ins with the forces of Olde Time Variety.
It is fun in places. Alun Owen's script has a smattering of great lines, mostly quips and puns already coined by the band in interviews. Lester comes up with a few moments of visual comic inventions. But, though it is heresy to say it, it is a bit dull. (And there aren't even that many good songs!)
The best line is Ringo's "I bet you're sorry you won," in response to the bowler-hatted square (Richard Vernon) in the first-class compartment who complains that he'd fought a war for people like them. Watching it now I rather side with the bowler hat. What was once fresh and irreverent, now seems just sarky and smug. I'm sure stuffy old repressed England had it coming, but now you watch it knowing that the social revolution they were harbingers of would prove substantially less liberating and helpful than expected and you think, bah, they're just a poor man's Monkees.
If I had one opportunity to go back in time and change history I think I would, reluctantly, eschew the opportunity to put a bullet in the young Hitler or Savile's skull but would rather, entirely peaceably and very reluctantly, ensure that Lennon and McCartney never met up. The Beatles were the most significant cultural force of the Twentieth Century, so influential that they probably seriously unbalanced western culture. In just seven years they just tore through almost the entire catalogue of possibilities for rock and pop music, leaving their antecedents to pick over the bones or try to rearrange their ideas.
They were a cultural revolution propelled along at a pace and fury that made Mao and the Red Bookers look pedestrian. Their influence was such that they marshalled through a range of social upheavals at a dizzying pace that society just wasn't able to take. If The Sixties could've been stretched out over a period of thirty or forty years, taken the revolution at a more sensible speed, who knows, maybe we would have genuinely become a liberal utopia. If the price of peace and love was never having The Beatles, I guess that's a price worth paying. Still, it would be a hell of a sacrifice.
Directed by Richard Lester. 1964.
Starring John, Paul, George, Ringo, Norman Rossington, John Junkin and Wilfred Brambell. Black and White. 87 mins
It was fifty years ago today, Richard Lester told the band to play. And run about. And pull funny faces. Made at the height of Beatlemania their first film captured them at a stage of their career when they were still really just a teenybopper band. If they'd called it quits after this, it's just possible that they'd be largely forgotten today, in which case Hard Day's Night would be viewed as a piece of tiresome Sixties narcissism, rather than the hallowed classic it is today.
Spinning the conceit that the Fab Four were really just a gang of mischievous school kids forever getting into scrapes, the whole film is them running away from gangs of girls that like them, hitting on other girls who they never quite click with and trying to elude the control of their manager (Rossington) who at one stage drags them out of a nightclub to make them go back and do their homework – answering fan mail. They also have to take care of Paul's surprisingly clean grandfather (Brambell) and have run-ins with the forces of Olde Time Variety.
It is fun in places. Alun Owen's script has a smattering of great lines, mostly quips and puns already coined by the band in interviews. Lester comes up with a few moments of visual comic inventions. But, though it is heresy to say it, it is a bit dull. (And there aren't even that many good songs!)
The best line is Ringo's "I bet you're sorry you won," in response to the bowler-hatted square (Richard Vernon) in the first-class compartment who complains that he'd fought a war for people like them. Watching it now I rather side with the bowler hat. What was once fresh and irreverent, now seems just sarky and smug. I'm sure stuffy old repressed England had it coming, but now you watch it knowing that the social revolution they were harbingers of would prove substantially less liberating and helpful than expected and you think, bah, they're just a poor man's Monkees.
If I had one opportunity to go back in time and change history I think I would, reluctantly, eschew the opportunity to put a bullet in the young Hitler or Savile's skull but would rather, entirely peaceably and very reluctantly, ensure that Lennon and McCartney never met up. The Beatles were the most significant cultural force of the Twentieth Century, so influential that they probably seriously unbalanced western culture. In just seven years they just tore through almost the entire catalogue of possibilities for rock and pop music, leaving their antecedents to pick over the bones or try to rearrange their ideas.
They were a cultural revolution propelled along at a pace and fury that made Mao and the Red Bookers look pedestrian. Their influence was such that they marshalled through a range of social upheavals at a dizzying pace that society just wasn't able to take. If The Sixties could've been stretched out over a period of thirty or forty years, taken the revolution at a more sensible speed, who knows, maybe we would have genuinely become a liberal utopia. If the price of peace and love was never having The Beatles, I guess that's a price worth paying. Still, it would be a hell of a sacrifice.
