FEATURE:
When I'm Home, Everything Seems to Be Right
IN THIS PHOTO: The Beatles (left to right: Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr and John Lennon) in a scene from 1964’s A Hard Day’s Night (directed by Richard Lester)/PHOTO CREDIT: United Artists/Getty Images
The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night at Sixty, and a Desire for a New Documentary or Biopic
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THERE has recently been….
IN THIS PHOTO: The Beatles posed in a portrait on a black backdrop in January 1964/PHOTO CREDIT: John Dominis/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
a lot of talk about and remembrance of The Beatles arriving in America for the first time and them playing for the first time on The Ed Sullivan Show. That first appearance happened on 9th February, 1964. Sixty years of a T.V. performance that changed popular culture and made history. Maybe gaining more popularity in the U.S. sooner – in the sense Beatlemania seemed to have started with the band’s first visit to the country – than here in the U.K., when they arrived back from the U.S. in February 1964, Beatlemania firmly was waiting for them at the airport. They could not escape the screams and fame. Their lives would never be the same again. From then, George Harrison, John Lennon, Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney could not perform live or go anywhere without there being this huge roar and attention. Maybe not all bad, I wanted to think and cast back to 1964. It is a year when they released the film and album, A Hard Day’s Night. I am know there will be celebrations around the sixtieth anniversary. The album came out on 26th June, 1964 in the U.S. (10th July in the U.K.); the film on 6th July. Of course, one would hope they’ll be screenings of the film in cinemas. As this studio album has not been reissued and given the Giles Martin treatment – where we get demos and outtakes -, I hope that this will be the next project. I wonder whether anyone has written a book about The Beatles’ 1964. Paul McCartney’s photobook gives first-hand insight into the whirlwind year. It really was a storm! Like nothing we have ever seen and will never see again, The Beatles were world-famous and the most sought-after band in the world less than a year after their amazing debut album, Please Please Me, was released. I often feel like the title track from A Hard Day’s Night was John Lennon and Paul McCartney reacting to their lives. The fact they have been working like dogs and wanted to sleep like logs – yet the schedule and fame will never allow that! The opening credits and that famous scene from the film is as close to their real life as imaginable.
The band running through the streets of London and being chased by hordes of fans. Having to hide and disguise themselves so they are not caught and, potentially, piled-on by thousands of screaming girls and women! I am going to come onto thoughts about the sixtieth anniversary of The Beatles arriving in America, conquering the globe, releasing a successful album and film of the same name – and plenty more besides! Has there been a recent documentary about this time and new interviews with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr? It is amazing to think that this band that put out their first album in 1963, by the following year, had risen to levels not seen before. This astonishing success. In 2014, USA Today talked about the relevance and freshness of The Beatles’ first feature film, A Hard Day’s Night, fifty years later:
“Hard Day's Night is that rare film that brilliantly captures a specific phenomenon and is also timeless.
John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were much more than mods, rockers or mockers. Audiences first met the film-star Beatles in A Hard Day's Night in 1964 as they mischievously navigated the insanity of screaming fans, neurotic producers and voracious press. From the first frame, who didn't yearn to be immersed in their madcap world eight days a week?
"You don't just want to watch it; you want to be in it," says director Steven Soderbergh, who co-wrote Getting Away With It with Hard Day's Night director Richard Lester. "You want to be one of them. You want to climb inside of it and be surrounded by that kind of energy."
From all accounts, the filmed ebullience of the four lads from Liverpool captured their real-life charisma.
"That specific kind of exuberance is very difficult, if not impossible, to fake," Soderbergh says. He ought to know: He says his 1998 fast-paced Out of Sight was inspired by it.
The film's blend of indelibly engaging Beatles music, wacky shenanigans and anarchic humor made it thoroughly infectious.
Nothing like the films of Elvis Presley, Cliff Richard or other music stars before The Beatles, A Hard Day's Night was so witty, stylish and joyously unrestrained that it influenced a spate of later comedies and created a template for contemporary music videos. Its style of rapid pacing, zig-zag cutting and playful one-liners remains inventive today.
"It's still fresh because it was done with so much energy," says Giles Martin, who produced Paul McCartney's 2013 album New and collaborated with his father, longtime Beatles producer George Martin, on the soundscape of Love, the Cirque du Soleil show that incorporates Beatles music. "They were parodying themselves in a tongue-in-cheek way. They had a huge ability to be irreverent and flippant, but with meaning."
Lester conveyed the magic and mystery of a rare phenomenon when he re-created what it was like to be one of the Fab Four at that seminal moment.
"It was sort of happenstance, the planets lining up with the perfect filmmaker to capture it," Soderbergh says. "That's really what's happening: He's capturing something as opposed to staging it."
As the black-and-white film celebrates its 50th anniversary with Criterion Collection's release of the Blu-Ray and DVD versions, and opens for a special summer engagement starting Friday at more than 100 theaters nationwide, it's an optimum time to examine the massive cinematic contribution of The Beatles and the filmmakers involved in A Hard Day's Night.
The quartet began working on the film just a month after their legendary appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964. The movie opened on July 6, 1964.
Lester let The Beatles' youthful irreverence shine through and raucously communicated the whirlwind of being the world's biggest musical stars.
Not only was it massively entertaining and brilliantly directed, the movie hugely expanded The Beatles' fan base in the United States and spread across the universe in a big way.
"At the time the film was contracted, The Beatles had not yet broken America," says biographer Mark Lewisohn, who wrote Tune In: The Beatles: All these Years. "It was made with the hope that it might help their popularity in America, but it was made pretty much on their strength in Britain. ... It was made to amuse but was also made as a vehicle for a pop group.
"Those kinds of films hadn't always been comedies. They'd been light with maybe funny moments, or attempts to be funny. It was a complete send-up of all the pop musicals before. The jukebox musical was the genre they were mining. And they just completely revolutionized it."
Lester intrinsically understood what an extraordinary phenomenon he was depicting.
"The Beatles knew Lester and he knew them," Soderbergh says. "They roped in (screenwriter) Alun Owen, who had an incredible ear for the kind of one-liners they were pretty good at coming up with on their own. Lester has such a great visual sense of humor and was able to put visual jokes on top of the verbal jokes."
Lester has said there was never any discussion about an alternative way of approaching the film.
"They were almost entirely asked to do what they normally did: to go to a club, to go to a rehearsal room," Lester, 82, said in a previously published interview included in a booklet that accompanies the anniversary collection DVD. He was not available to be interviewed for this story.
Lester cleverly incorporated improvisation. The memorable scene in which the four moptops attend a news conference and give hilariously goofy responses to journalists was unscripted, developed as they filmed.
"They couldn't shoot on the street anymore," Soderbergh says. "They were creating so much chaos because crowds were showing up. So Lester said, 'Get me a room and get me a bunch of journalists and they started writing up these questions.' "
Viewers gets a mounting sense of four musician pals held captive — or at least hemmed in — by their escalating fame. When they run onto an empty field (and sing Can't Buy Me Love), their sense of release is palpable.
Deftly conveying the surrealistic adventure of the Liverpool lads (without ever mentioning the name The Beatles in the film), Lester juxtaposed their impudence with the taciturn weirdness of veteran British actor Wilfrid Brambell, who played Paul's oh-so-clean grandfather. Lester has said he capitalized on the four pals' "private idiom" along with a faux sense of cinema verité, heightened in black and white. Flourishes of the Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton, Jacques Tati and Britain's The Goon Show infuse the film.
The blend of fast-paced visual antics and witty wordplay in A Hard Day's Night left a legacy evident in the Monty Python movies and mockumentaries like This is Spinal Tap, and it still resonates in comedies today.
As Soderbergh puts it: "Even for all its frantic feeling, it's still a beautifully crafted movie. Prior to that, films with music in them tended to be more staged and much more formal in their cinematic approach. This thing looks like it was shot tomorrow”.
IN THIS PHOTO: The Beatles during filming of A Hard Day’s Night in London, 1964. The Beatles’ film was primarily shot on a moving train/PHOTO CREDIT: David Hurn/Magnum Photos
I think, as 1964 was such an important year for The Beatles, whether there will be sixtieth anniversary reissues and celebration. Their iconic appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show would perfectly be marked by documentary including that footage. Maybe a special album or release around those performances. A Hard Day’s Night - the film and the album - are sixty soon. I know there were events around the fiftieth anniversary. As it has been a decade, many will be discovering that album and film for the first time. What about the studio album?! Are we going to get a reissue with some demos and extras?! Maybe a film release with behind the scenes, interviews or people discussing the impact of the film and The Beatles’ impact. I guess many would say a biopic is sacrilege. Committing that year and period of The Beatles’ career to film with actors playing them. I do think that, if there were no plans for a documentary or special, having a film looking inside such a hectic and history-making period would be amazing. Not having actors sing the songs themselves, you could use actual recordings but have the actors do the speaking parts. I don’t know. I do think that really getting a view into their world and what they experienced sixty years ago would prove hugely popular. There is a lot to mark and focus on. Go and check out all the videos you can on YouTube. You can watch A Hard Day’s Night here, buy the album of the same name here. I think it is also worth watching videos like this that give an impression of how nuts things were in 1964. The reaction they got from every note and move! I do hope, at least, sixty years after the release of A Hard Day’s Night film and album, that they are given…
SPECIAL treatment.