Reel Beatlemania

Re-released to coincide happily with the start of another era of Merseyside world domination (5-4!!!), the seminal first Beatles movie A Hard Day’s Night is about to hit Irish screens following a major restoration, replete with crisp digitally-restored soundtrack. We got to see it the other day, and to our utter amazement, the film actually holds up extremely well today. While the infectious teenypop on offer (‘She Loves You’, ‘All My Loving’, ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’) hardly represents the gang’s musical zenith, their unique sense of humour shines forth throughout to highly pleasing effect. It may never feature prominently in All-Time Greatest Movie lists, but within its own sphere this is a classic of sorts: as then Village Voice critic Andrew Sarris had it, ‘the Citizen Kane of jukebox movies.’

A Hard Day’s Night also marks the birth of the musical mockumentary genre, following a day in the life (sorry!) of John, Paul, Gerorge and Ringo in 1964 as they travel from Liverpool to London in order to film a television special. As such, the film dispenses with plot, and gleefully freefalls into a maelstrom of playful conversational pieces, heavily infected with raw Liverpudlian wit, endless comic setpieces involving hysterical teenage fans, ‘keystone’ cops, melodramatic TV producers, overly eager members of the press, and fashion devotees for whom “Ducky” and “Chicky Baby” are favoured modes of address.

Most of the film’s charm, obviously, is provided by the Beatles themselves. Long before the time “they got so out of it they let Ringo sing” (© Bill Hicks), the foursome form an indelible portrait of youthful exuberance and unbridled mischief. Where else would you hear McCartney declaring “Up The Workers!” or Ringo chastising someone for “hiding behind bourgeois cliches”? The star of the show, of course, is John Lennon, oozing an acute sense of heightened joy at every turn. When not chasing skirt (a pursuit he devotes himself to for the film’s entire duration), he’s in the bathtub re-enacting great undersea battles of World War Two, alternating between humming ‘Rule Brittania’ and ‘Deutschland Uber Alles’ depending on who is winning.

A tour de force of irreverent wit, director Richard Lester says of Lennon’s performance: ‘He was unique. He suffered fools badly, and he was quick-witted and quickly cynical. He hated pomposity, and hated people in authority who treated them (the band) as hired servants. If you were on the receiving end of his anger it could be painful, but it was never continuously vicious. He was a man that threw a grudge quickly and then disposed of it, and then you would get up and do the next work. He just said what he felt, and it was refreshing. I don’t think John could be in a film any other way.’

It’s worth noting that the Beatles’ enormous amiability in A Hard Day’s Night is very largely down to Lester’s sympathetic direction: his idiosyncratic approach perfectly captures the band’s sardonic wit, and the mind-boggling mania of their most devoted fans.

The result went on to receive two Academy Awards, as well as influencing the ‘British Film Industry’ for a decade, and giving rise to a proliferation of Austin Powers-style ‘Swinging Sixties’ London comedies and spy thrillers.

More significantly, the film set the pace for every pop-phenomenon cash-in movie that followed, introducing a looser narrative structure and a verité style which proved to have a far-reaching impact on cinema. As film critic Roger Ebert has noted: “Today, when we watch TV and see quick-cutting, hand-held cameras, interviews conducted on the run with moving targets, quickly intercut snatches of dialogue, music under documentary action and all the other trademarks of the modern style, we are looking at the children of A Hard Day’s Night.”

Almost four decades on, this is as refreshing a film as any of its kind.

A Hard Day’s Night opens at selected cinemas nationwide on June the 1st.