+ intro by broadcaster Samira Ahmed
Shot in a documentary style inspired by the French New Wave, the Beatles’ first feature film captured Britain at a moment of social transformation, with a portrayal of celebrity, camaraderie and media frenzy that still resonates today. To mark publication of her BFI Film Classic on A Hard Day’s Night, author Samira Ahmed’s introduction will explore how a film made to celebrate a pop phenomenon became an enduring cinematic classic.
A Hard Day’s Night falls into that category of films you can easily feel you’ve seen without seeing. The Beatles in drainpipe trousers, Chelsea boots and black and white, mop-topped and mob tailed, chased here, there and everywhere around Liverpool’s Lime Street station – this is a sequence so often imitated, parodied and quoted that it fully merits that most overused of words, iconic. Other scenes wallpaper almost every Beatles documentary you’d care to mention: the group larking on a playing field, caught on film from a circling helicopter, or Ringo Starr on a stroppy, short-lived sabbatical from the group, drifting along a riverside in an oversized overcoat. And then, too, it’s tempting to discount it as a cash-in and spin-off, a supplement to a music career that can only ever be a secondary work.
In fact the music in A Hard Day’s Night came after the film, with Lennon and McCartney writing new material specifically for it. The film was titled and only then was the song written, when producer Walter Shenson decided they needed one more number with which to open and close. Shot in a matter of weeks in spring 1964, just after the group’s February appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, A Hard Day’s Night was made under pressure, with the tidal wave of American popularity gathering behind them and a July release date looming in front. The result is an ingenious piece of sustained improvisation by director Richard Lester, screenwriter Alun Owen and the four Beatles, made on the fly and yet combining classic cinematic elements with a breezy irreverence that affected the way pop music performance is shot and edited to this day.
‘The chase,’ Alfred Hitchcock said in a 1950 interview, ‘seems to me the final expression of the motion picture medium… I would say the chase is almost indigenous to movie technique as a whole.’ And A Hard Day’s Night could be subtitled ‘Band on the Run’: from the opening Lime Street scenes to its conclusion with the group racing to a helicopter (for a ‘midnight matinee in Wolverhampton’), and in between John, Paul and George hunting the AWOL Ringo with packs of police on their heels. Its repeated use of the stage direction ‘Exeunt, pursued by fans’ echoes Gene Kelly’s escape via Debbie Reynolds’s car in Singin’ in the Rain. But the element of clowning also taps in to currents from the earliest film comedies. Ringo’s disconsolate wander alludes to Chaplin and Keaton, but it’s not the only such moment: all four of The Beatles were surprisingly capable physical comedians. When a song features and the group isn’t shown performing it, it usually soundtracks them in extended slapstick goofs – as when they stumble on to a fire escape, and after a hectic dash down it (one almost as dizzying as the Eiffel Tower descent in The Lavender Hill Mob), they run wild on an empty playing field.
Yet A Hard Day’s Night is predominantly forward-looking. Parallels with the nouvelle vague may be slightly overplayed, but they are unquestionably there, in its fleetness of foot, and faith in the simple equation of band + camera + wit = film. And it’s there too in its impatience with perfection: for the happily amateur dance scene in Godard’s Bande à part (released the same year), see George Harrison knocking over an amp on stage or losing a shoe boarding a helicopter. Lester’s liberal use of handheld cameras, meanwhile, suffuses A Hard Day’s Night with a kind of fugitive twitchiness, a subtle sense that anyone might just cut and run – even a cameraman.
Richard Lester and editor John Jympson arguably invented a new vocabulary for capturing stage performance, with multiple mobile cameras weaving in between the musicians. Stylistic tics to be seen in any given moment of present-day Glastonbury coverage can be seen coming in to focus for the first time here. Close-ups of Starr’s foot on a kick-drum pedal; a shot down the gleaming strings on a guitar neck; the camera roaming behind Starr to gaze out through the band to the wall of teenage faces creating a wall of sound. (The soundtrack, remixed in 5.1 surround by Giles Martin, captures that sound in unnerving, unearthly detail.) Lester often shows us the multiple, unmixed camera feeds seen on monitors by the TV director (played by Victor Spinetti): it’s a neat device which brings the mechanics of the medium to the fore and lets the viewer’s eye skip freely from viewpoint to viewpoint. One can easily imagine George Harrison being riveted by such details, and that’s one more legacy to be remembered when watching A Hard Day’s Night – a gleam in the eye that would become Harrison’s HandMade Films.
Sam Davies, Sight and Sound, August 2014
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
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