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Prior to it was a mixed bag of showcases (performance clips stitched together with a basic plot) and attempts to expand the stars' horizons by getting them to act in full strength narratives. But for every solid Jailhouse Rock or Expresso Bongo (a title that makes me wince just to type, it's like hearing someone say excape) there were countless soggy promo jaunts or cinematic outings built around pretty bipedal voids. This might have been one of those. There are good reasons why it wasn't.
First, Dick Lester, American ex-pat who had made short films with the Goons comedy troupe, had lifted one of those showcase scripts to comedic heights in It's Trad Dad. Instead of having to shoehorn his stars into a PR-written screenplay, he worked with Alun Owen's genuinely funny script. Owen had spent time with the band, picking up character tips and the kind of interpersonal wit that they would soon typify them throughout the world. Oh, that's the other thing: Rather than Cliff (all respect) Lester had The Beatles.
The Beatles had just spent a year that took them from a modestly charting northern English outfit to the biggest band in Europe. The term Beatlemania was coined to cope with the phenomenon of the mass of screaming young women who seemed to burst from the plumbing like stormwater whenever the band appeared in public. The film production company United Artists were chiefly interested in sales of the accompanying soundtrack and paid little mind to the quality of what amounted to them as an ad. Between pre-production and production, though, The Beatles landed in New York, went for a tiny live tour and appeared on salient tv shows that amounted to them becoming a multi-megaton culture bomb and, in a few weeks, rendered them the biggest act of any kind on the face of the Earth. So, the movie was going to hit, whatever it was, but that it was this movie that has kept it respected across decades.
After a title sequence deals with the mania like it's an epic scaled male toss fantasy, the band get on the train for one of the most enjoyably blocked, written and performed opening sequences of its time. Their characters are established, the subplot of Paul's grandfather is introduced and a sequence involving the stuffy older generation is played out with an expansion which heralds the departure this outing is making from more standard pop movie fare. From mugging in the carriage window at the posh banker to suddenly appearing outside the train, banging on the window and calling: "hey mister, can we have our ball back?" If it looked like a light faux documentary before that it wouldn't from that point. From the solo spots to the breakout in the sports field to the police chases this is going to be a promo exercise and a pisstake all at once.
That's where The Beatles themselves come in. While the screenplay was written and ready before the explosive American tour, the footage coming back from it, the sharply funny press conferences and the Maysles' documentary of it with its own train scene that could have been a first draft for the fictional one, informed this film. The guys were young, energetic, ambitious and naturally funny. The press party scene is reality pushed very little and the laddish larking on the train, in anything, constrained by the script. While the tv performances in the movie are mimed to records, the live performances on Ed Sullivan were tightly delivered. The movie felt, suspended disbelief aside, real. Even the production constraint of using black and white helped as it kept the look and feel closer to the Billy Liars or Kind of Lovings of the British new wave than the bright technicolour of the Cliff Richard movies which, by comparison, looked like showbiz.
The solo spots work away from this, though, putting each one into a character signifying situation. John has a small but funny mini comedy of errors with a gossiping tv staffer. Ringo goes paradin' around London and shows some promise as a film actor. My favourite is George walking into the marketing office and dealing with the hyped up ideas man, trading buzzword proposals with flat Scouse knockbacks. Paul's was dropped from the edit as it dragged the pace. The film was destroyed but you can still read the scripted scene with a Google search. None of the band individually is given lines longer than about ten words. The object was not to make Richard Burtons of them but to sell the "naturalism": if this is showbiz let's make showbiz more interesting, let's make it at least feel real.
Wilfrid Brambell as Paul's troublemaking grandfather is perfect casting. The running gag about him being so clean is in direct reference to his iconic tv role as old man Steptoe who was always the "dirty old man". If The Beatles are knockabout and larky, he is constantly undermining, an agent of chaos. Oddly enough, for a film about youthful freedom, it's his unredeemed chancing and undermining that expresses most of that sense of unbridled action. The managerial team of Norm and Shake are possibly the least convincing as comic figures with Norman Rossington's frustrations at failing to control John feeling like they come from an old army life comedy. John Junkin as Shake is more successful, being given some of the weirder side moments and lines like wincing as George shaves his reflection in the bathroom mirror, which are more in keeping with the contemporary comic feel. Beatles movie stalwart Victor Spinetti's paranoid tv director feels a little too contrived over the decades but the contrast between his high strung superiority and the big, fluffy Dr Seuss jumper he's wearing does a lot of the talking.
And then there's the music. Yes it's mimed (but impressively so, you can easily follow chord changes on fretboards and drumming as they do it) but it sounds better for all that. The tv live set is compacted (with more than a few crossfades between songs. The point of going through all of it is really to show the bargain: you scream for it, we'll play it. The mini Beatlemania in the next to last scene, after all the fun chases and banter and satire and jibes is what sold the most tickets as the girls paid to see people identical to themselves screaming out the explosive thrill of being young and electric and, however briefly, powerful. (Incidentally, if you look at the audience here you'll also note how multi-racial it is. It's not presented as a big point but it wouldn't look like that if they'd made this in America.) This is the film's climax in more than one sense and it's compelling. We're not witnessing idolatry so much as mass assertion and it's not on stage but in front of it. Whatever reasons they gave for creating their music this was, at this time, the number one, the demographic which, in other circumstances they would need to pursue was rushing at them as a tsunami of adoration, such that I will never be able to fully imagine.
Finally, for all its contrivances, A Hard Day's Night works now the way the things it most immediately influenced don't. Apart from the song scenes, any given episode of The Monkees is a dragging watch. I'll give John Boorman's Catch Us if You Can a point for bearing some serious social commentary (with the Dave Clark Five!) but it still doesn't reach these heights. For me, it's the kind of contrived naturalism that the members of the biggest band in the world affected when witnesses were about. Whether in their matching suits or Emperor's New Psychedelic Threads, The Beatles playing up to cameras, trading wordplay with journalists or clowning felt like them. It meant that there was no question of selling out as they were already unassailable. That meant that anyone who tried to use the formula came a cropper or produced something that looked like a respectful copy which was against the point. Hard Day's Night still works because, as preposterous as this sounds, it feels real.
Viewing notes: I watched the splendid Criterion 4K of this but it can be seen for free on Brollie and SBS on Demand.
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