Richard Lester (1964)
According to Sam Davies’s piece in Sight and Sound (August 2014), which the BFI used part of in its programme note, A Hard Day’s Night was made on the fly as a result of commercial pressure – after the Beatles’ appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, in February 1964, which generated a ‘tidal wave of American popularity’. Richard Lester’s quicksilver film communicates a sense of nervous urgency – a quality that it’s not hard to read as anxiety that the Beatles could be a nine-day wonder. This is one of several reasons why A Hard Day’s Night, on its fiftieth anniversary re-release, is so remarkable and enjoyable. Another reason is that it’s George Martin’s son Giles who has remixed the soundtrack; this creates a bridge between the original film and the version now in cinemas. There were good contemporary documentaries made about the Beatles, notably the Maysles brothers’ What’s Happening! The Beatles in the USA (which also appeared in 1964). But parts of A Hard Day’s Night have a quasi-documentary interest too – shots of the Beatles in performance (the camera picking up looks exchanged between them that the live audience in the theatre can’t see), a sequence in which they escape from their hotel room to a bar where they dance and chat with girls. The piece is also engaging as a time capsule – right from the opening sequence, which includes the group’s harassed manager Norm struggling to open a pyramidal carton of milk (the shape of the carton brings to mind Joosa Jims) that he’s bought from a machine on a railway station. You’re reminded of the anatomy of trains of the era, during the Beatles’ journey from Liverpool to London, and the climactic recording of a television show takes the viewer on a tour of the bowels of a superannuated theatre. (Marylebone Station stands in for Lime Street; the theatre was the Scala on Charlotte Street, demolished in 1969 after being badly damaged in a fire.) The Beatles’ audiences are amusing too, treading a fine line between spontaneous hysteria and taking care to get right the required gestures and expressions.
Of course the Beatles themselves and their music are the heart and the principal fascination of A Hard Day’s Night. The soundtrack includes, as well as the title song, ‘I Should Have Known Better’, ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, ‘If I Fell’, ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’, ‘And I Love Her’, ‘This Boy’, ‘Tell Me Why’, ‘All My Loving’ and ‘She Loves You’. The last two were released in 1963 but I hadn’t realised that most of the other songs were written by Lennon and McCartney for the film – an astonishing illustration of their creativity and productivity. All four of the Beatles are easy with the camera, and, playing themselves, are effective actors. The supporting cast is interesting in various ways. Those who play straight do best – notably Norman Rossington as the dogged worrywart Norm (he’s most un-Brian-Epstein-like: the man himself appears briefly in a bit part but I missed him) and Anna Quayle, in a great cameo as a woman who’s not sure if she recognises John Lennon. (The group’s phenomenal celebrity comes and goes, as required by the plot.) John Junkin, as the roadie, and Kenneth Haigh, as an advertising man, do well enough; so do Richard Vernon (a pompous posh bloke on the train) and the similarly reliable Deryck Guyler (a policeman – not for the first or the last time). Others seem too anxious to assert their comedy credentials: Victor Spinetti is unfunny as the prima donna TV show director; Wilfrid Brambell’s performance as Paul’s grandfather (commended by everyone he meets as ‘very clean’, obviously in contrast to the actor’s ‘dirty old man’ Albert Steptoe) is famous but he’s tiresome. That sentimental, injured look works fine in Steptoe and Son, as a counterpoint to Albert’s sordid shiftiness and a foil to Harry H Corbett, but Brambell relies too much on it here. He’s funny only – and thanks mostly to Richard Lester – in a (repeated) trap door gag on the Scala stage. The lively, witty script is by Alun Owen, the black-and-white cinematography by Gilbert Taylor (who died last year at the age of ninety-nine). The hyperkinetic movement of the (often hand-held) camera was soon a cliché but the visuals seem fresh and inventive here, and Lester creates a real coherence between the look of the film and the spirit of its protagonists. A Hard Day’s Night gave Lester his breakthrough in cinema but, in spite of the success of The Knack … and the second Beatles film, Help!, which quickly followed, this remains probably his best work.
15 July 2014
