#711: LESTER, Richard: A Hard Day's Night (1964)

LESTER, Richard (United Kingdom)

A Hard Day's Night [1964]

Spine #711
Blu-ray

Meet the Beatles! Just one month after they exploded onto the U.S. scene with their Ed Sullivan Show appearance, John, Paul, George, and Ringo began working on a project that would bring their revolutionary talent to the big screen. A Hard Day's Night, in which the bandmates play slapstick versions of themselves, captured the astonishing moment when they officially became the singular, irreverent idols of their generation and changed music forever. Directed with raucous, anything-goes verve by Richard Lester and featuring a slew of iconic pop anthems, including the title track, "Can't Buy Me Love," "I Should Have Known Better," and "If I Fell," A Hard Day's Night, which reconceived the movie musical and exerted an incalculable influence on the music video, is one of the most deliriously entertaining movies of all time.

87 minutes
Black & White

Monaural/Stereo/5.1 Surround

1:75:1 aspect ratio

Criterion Release 2014

Director/Writers

Written by Alun Owen.

Richard Lester was 32 when he directed A Hard Day's Night.

The Film

• John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr.
• Wilfrid Brambell (John McCartney)
• Norman Rossington (Norm)
• John Junkin (Shake)
• Victor Spinetti (TV director)
• Pattie Boyd (Jean, brunette schoolgirl on the train, and George’s future wife!)
• Charlotte Rampling (nightclub dancer)
• Phil Collins (schoolboy watching the Beatles’ TV performance)
• Music (all [incorrectly] credited to Lennon/McCartney):
• A Hard Day’s Night (opening credits)
• I Should Have Known Better
• I Wanna Be Your Man (sample)
• Don’t Bother Me (Harrison) (sample)
• All My Loving (sample)
• If I Fell
• Can’t Buy Me Love
• And I Love Her
• I’m Happy Just to Dance with You (George sings lead)
• Ringo’s Theme (This Boy) (instrumental, arr. George Martin)
• A Hard Day’s Night (sample, instrumental, arr. Martin)
• Can’t Buy Me Love (reprise)
• Tell Me Why
• If I Fell (reprise)
• I Should Have Known Better (reprise)
• She Loves You
• A Hard Day’s Night (reprise; closing credits)
• The inside joke that Paul’s grandfather is a “clean old man” is derived from the fact that Brambell played a “dirty old man” in Steptoe and Son, a British sitcom.
• Budget of £200,000 ($500,000). United Artists thought the film would be a loss leader:
• “Our record division wants to get the soundtrack album to distribute in the States, and what we lose on the film we’ll get back on this disc.”
• Brian Epstein has an uncredited bit part: 0:28:24.
• So does Mal Evans — the Beatles’ road manager. He’s seen moving an upright bass through a tight hallway.
• The film premiered on American television on October 24, 1967 on NBC. The usual Peacock introduction, which preceded all NBC color broadcasts of the era, was replaced by a humorous black-and-white animated cartoon penguin, with cartoon representations of the Beatles jumping out of its stomach.
• This Criterion edition — released on June 24, 2014 — was the first U.S. Blu-ray.
• The scene where Paul’s grandfather (first) pops up on the stage from under the set is the Trinke Liebchen (Drinking Song) from Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus.
• Grandfather to Ringo at the police station:
• “If they get you on floor — watch out for your brisket!”
• Other great lines:
• Reporter: “Tell me, how did you find America?”
• John: “Turn left at Greenland.”
• And:
• Female reporter to John: “Have you any hobbies?”
• John writes something on a pad of paper. It’s clearly TITS …
• Prior to the American release, a United Artists executive asked Lester to dub the voices of the group with mid-Atlantic accents.
• McCartney replied: “Look, if we can understand a fucking cowboy talking Texan, they can understand us talking Liverpool.”
• Peter Sellers and The Goon Show were a major influence on the Beatles -- especially their unified dry wit. Don't miss this!

A classic in every sense of the word. Lester was a unique filmmaker, who directed by the seat-of-his-pants (see below) and whose supreme confidence in what he was doing shows up in every frame.

Told he had been labelled the father of MTV, he jokingly responded by asking for a paternity test.

Film Rating (0-60):

58

The Extras

The Booklet

Eighty-four page booklet featuring an essay by critic Howard Hampton and excerpts from a 1970 interview with Lester.

Hampton:

“If you are seeing A Hard Day’s Night for the second, fifth, or fortieth time, you’re bound to catch some perfect detail — a brazen incongruity, sneaky delight, or intangible grace note — you missed on the first, fourth, or thirty-ninth go-round. Everyone recalls the tall man in the club jumping alongside diminutive Ringo, inventing pogo dancing long before the punks embraced it. But for all these years, with my eyes glued on that Mutt and Jeff pair, I had completely missed the wondrously elongated, posh bird opposite them laughing uproariously, throwing herself into the music, the moment. She has a gangly, go-go-ing sophistication that takes the breath away (the spectator’s and her own too).

A split second before Ringo and the tall guy (Jeremy Lloyd — stage actor, Beatles acquaintance, and regular clubgoer) start jumping, on the sidelines there’s another toothy lovely in a vest, listening to John. It first looks like she has one stylish boot up on the table. But when you look more closely — and A Hard Day’s Night repays frame-by-frame examination more fully than the Zapruder film — you discover her heel is actually cupped in a companion’s hand. Furthermore, she’s wiggling it slowly, delectably, and oh-so-indolently, nibbling on whatever the in crowd nibbled in the spring of 1964. It last only eight or nine seconds, and amid the shimmer of ‘All My Loving’ and the swirl of bouffant hairdos and akimbo limbs, it’s easy to miss. But once you catch it, it seems like an offhand code for a transformed social world that’s being sculpted before your eyes: it isn’t the blunt kinkiness of the image, it’s the casualness, the way the cool and wry and fetishistic are all being folded into everyday conversation, ordinary life. Roll over, Antonioni, and tell Buñuel the news …”

Lester interview:

“There is something about the Beatles. Before we started, we knew that it would be unlikely that they could (a) learn, (b) remember, or (c) deliver with any accuracy a long speech. So the structure of the script had to be a series of one-liners. This enabled me, in many of the scenes, to turn a camera on them and say a line to them, and they would say it back to me. If it didn’t turn out terribly well, I would say it again in another way, and they would say it back in another way …”

“I think in a total image of the scene. And then I go in, normally, to do the scene in probably one shot — and find that it is not possible, and then do it in another one, not thinking about cutting them in any order, not thinking about montage in the scene, but thinking about a series of shots which are useful. Having done two or three of those, I then think, if I have to use them all, what is the best way to put the mortar in and use those inserts? How can I point up little pieces that will be useful so that, eventually, if I have to put all those shots together, I can have a flowing sequence? But I do not preplan that. I don’t preplan anything. If we went into shooting this scene, I would think, well, I know that I got a master — well, I will not say a master, because that is not normally done that way. And I certainly don’t start thinking, well, I will have a wide shot and then I will come in. I think, there is this room, and what is interesting is that we are all huddled up in one corner. The first thing I would do is accentuate that and play the whole thing, letting the actors feel their way through. And shoot as early as possible, making sure that everyone knows the lines and we all agree that they are roughly the lines that should go into the scene. By the third rehearsal, I will be telling the actors that I am shooting them. Having done that, I get the feeling of how it is going. I would not plan it the night before, because I wouldn’t know that it is going to be raining and that I might put this light on. Or I wouldn’t know that you would be wearing these clothes, or I could have planned this scene for a sixty-year-old man with gray hair and a business suit. You just don’t know. And having done that, little bits will become interesting. They may be your coat hanging out . . . but there will not be any orderly path.”

[on Help!] “I have a very warm feeling toward Help!, and nobody else does — or not many. Very few people preferred it. Fellini and Zeffirelli said it was on of their favorite films. Renoir loved it. I was delighted.”

Commentary

Featuring cast and crew.

Barrie Melrose, second assistant director; Denis O’Dell, associate producer; Betty Glasow, hairdresser; Paul Wilson, camera operator; Gilbert Taylor, director of photography; Roy Benson, assistant editor; Pamela Tomling, assistant editor; Gordon Daniel, sound editor; Jim Roddan, sound editor; actor Junkin; actor Lloyd; actor Lionel Blair (T.V. Choreographer); actor Anna Quayle (Millie); actor David Janson (young boy); Terry Hooper (casino croupier).

• Shake was based on Mal Evans.
• 0:10:53: The train’s going in the opposite direction …
• Some good jokes:
• “I was at a party with Ringo once — I was with my wife, and I said, ‘we just had a boy.’ Ringo said, ‘Well, I’ve got a daughter … you know, you’re not a man til you’ve had a girl.” [rimshot]
• In the end, this is not much of a helpful commentary with 13 people talking at once …

In Their Own Voices

A piece combining 1964 interviews with the Beatles with behind-the-scenes footage and photos.

Wonderful. John:

“The bit on the train really happened to us, when the man came and closed the window and put the radio off — and we told Alun (Owen) and he put it in …”

George:

“My dad used to play guitar in the Merchant Navy, just for his own amusement; I had a brother who was in a choir once, but thong really show-business-y — I didn’t want to be anything. All the time I was at school, I used to just get my guitar out at night and I used to neglect my work at school, cause of the guitar, so that was the only thing I really wanted to do was to able to play the guitar and go on stage. And as luck would have it, that’s what I was able to do, and it paid off …”

“You Can’t Do That” — The Making of A Hard Day’s Night

A 1994 documentary by producer Walter Shenson including an outtake performance by the Beatles.

Collins freeze-frames his appearance; it’s nice to see the kid who would later become such a star.

The outtake — You Can’t Do That — is a welcome extra.

Things They Said Today

A 2002 documentary about the film featuring Lester, music producer George Martin, screenwriter Owen, and cinematographer Gilbert Taylor.

Good to hear from Martin.

Picturewise

A piece about Lester’s early work, featuring a new audio interview with the director.

“October 1963. United Artists plan to make a film a new British pop sensation. They want to get the film in cinemas by July the next year, because they think by then The Beatles will have peaked, and will soon fade from memory.”

Goes over his filmography:

• It’s Trad, Dad! (aka Ring-A-Ding Rhythm!  (1962)
• The Mouse on the Moon (1963)
• The Knack … and How to Get It (1965)
• Help! (1965)
• A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966)
• How I Won the War (1967) (w/Lennon)
• Petulia (1968)
• The Bed Sitting Room (1969)
• The Three Musketeers (1973)
• Juggernaut (1974)
• Robin and Marian (1976)
• Superman II (1980)
• Superman III (1983)

The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film (1960)

Lester’s Oscar-nominated short.

Meh.

Anatomy of a Style

A piece on Lester’s methods; deconstructing five of the musical sequences …

Interview

With author Mark Lewisohn.

The Beatles expert (if you haven’t read All These Years, Vol. 1: Tune In, you’re missing something great) …

Lewissohn goes through the history, with the fluency of any great historian.

2000 rerelease trailer

2014 rerelease trailer

Extras Rating (0-40):

38

58 + 38 =

96

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