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‘A Hard Day’s Night’ at 60: You know you should be glad

With his nimble 1964 film, Richard Lester captured the spirit of the early Beatles and made one of the great screen musicals

Published20 Jul 2024, 05:00 PM IST

In its unassuming way, 'A Hard Day's Night' changed cinema — In its unassuming way, ’A Hard Day’s Night’ changed cinema

“We’re out!”

It’s one of the great moments of exhilaration in cinema, on par with Denis Lavant doing cartwheels in Mauvais Sang and “I’m the king of the world!” For the first 37 minutes of A Hard Day’s Night, The Beatles are contained. Mobbed by teenage fans and followed closely by their disapproving manager, they’re herded from car to soundstage to train to hotel room. But after a tour of the stodgy TV studio they’re performing at later, you can see a jailbreak coming. It happens so quickly it’s breathtaking. Ringo sees a door to a fire escape, then we cut and the camera is outside, in time to catch his joyous yell as the four band members race down the stairs and ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ explodes on the soundtrack.

The musical sequence that follows is, like the film itself, extremely influential and much-imitated, but also weightless and charming no matter how many times you watch it. It’s just John, Paul, George and Ringo messing about in a field. But director Richard Lester speeds up the action, slows it down, shoots it from a helicopter, cuts and dices it into fragments. It’s an early prototype of the music video, of “MTV-style” editing. It also has an underrated closing line, as George tells the scolding owner, “Sorry we hurt your field, mister.”

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A Hard Day’s Night turned 60 last week. For something that’s now regarded as a landmark of 1960s pop culture and one of the great movie musicals, its beginnings were modest. It was an attempt by Hollywood studio United Artists to cash in on the band’s success in Britain (they would conquer America after appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964). They hired an American director in London, Richard Lester. He had a musical (It’s Trad, Dad!, 1962) and an Oscar-nominated short (The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film, 1959) on his resume, the latter made with some of the cast of one of The Beatles’ favourite comedies, The Goon Show, which Lester helped relocate from radio to TV. The film’s hectic pace mirrored its lighting fast production: filming began on 2 March 1964 and it opened in the UK on 10 July.

Lester had worked in radio, TV and film, had an anarchic bent of mind and a keen eye (his next film, The Knack... and How to Get It, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1965). He admired the silent comics, which is evident in A Hard Day’s Night’s numerous pratfalls and gags and most of all in the sequence where The Beatles are chased by a gaggle of British bobbies behaving like Keystone Cops. The film also mirrored the cinema of the time. The French New Wave was buzzing, and its influence is evident in the hand-held camerawork, the bold cutting, the freeze frames and the create-as-you-go approach. You could play Lester’s film in a double bill with Jean-luc Godard’s Masculin-Feminin (1966), a funny, charged portrait of Parisian youth.

A Hard Day’s Night lifts the curtain on the mechanics of showbiz, not just the modern world of TV, with banks of screens overseen by frantic producers, but the older disciplines of song and dance, theatre and variety show (one of the best visual gags is Paul’s mischievous ‘grandfather’, played by Wilfrid Brambell, patting the arm of a magician standing next to a board that says “10 disappearing doves”, upon which a few feathers float down and the man unhappily crosses out the 10 and writes 9). Though much of the film has The Beatles dodging the restrictions of old, stodgy British society, the send-up is never cutting. Three years later, The Beatles would contrast the different realities of older and younger generations in their epochal album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Because the Beatles couldn’t be expected to learn pages of dialogue, the film—a documentary-seeming account of 36 hours in their lives—was written as a series of one-liners. Even so, the four Beatles’ ease with the camera is hugely impressive—it’s almost indistinguishable from actual documentary footage of the four from the time. John is the best actor of the bunch, his unhurried drawl belying his timing and slapstick physicality (see the moment he joins in with the TV studio dance number). George’s misunderstanding with the shirt company and Ringo’s self-searching excursion are more substantial solo scenes, but I prefer John’s surreal exchange with the actress in the corridor.

Lester’s film benefitted from the soundtrack being the strongest of the band’s three albums to date, with all 13 songs written by Lennon-McCartney. The film opens with the extraordinary chord from the title track, and closes with the ringing Rickenbacker fadeout of ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’. In between we hear ‘Tell Me Why’, ‘And I Love Her’, ‘I Should Have Known Better’ and, as the grand finale, their all-conquering single from the previous year, ‘She Loves You’. A Hard Day’s Night caught The Beatles at just the right time. In 1964, they were madly famous but not yet jaded, experienced but youthful. By the time they appeared in another, very different film by Lester, Help! (1965), they were tuning out (“We were smoking marijuana for breakfast during that period,” John said later. “Nobody could communicate with us…”). A Hard Day’s Night was the last time The Beatles could sing without irony, “You know you should be glad.” What a blessing that Richard Lester was around to bottle this feeling.

‘A Hard Day’s Night’ at 60: You know you should be glad

With his nimble 1964 film, Richard Lester captured the spirit of the early Beatles and made one of the great screen musicals

Also read: Bond, the Beatles and British culture’s last glorious sunrise

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