A Hard Day's Night [M]

A day in the life of a teenager is challenging enough, but for John, Paul, George, and Ringo it’s downright dangerous. Between getting chased by manic fans, butting heads with TV producers and admen, and fielding idiotic press questions about their haircuts life for the teen sensations is pretty hectic. But it becomes more so when the band is due to play for a live TV audience and they have to babysit Paul’s ‘clean’ but troublesome grandfather, rebel against practically everything their manager says, and hunt for Ringo when he goes missing half an hour before the show. 

I can’t say that I was ever really a big Beatles fan, I like a great many of their songs to be sure, but I didn’t go out of my way to listen to their music: I sort of absorbed them osmotic-like. So all I can do with this movie is look at it in terms of a movie and not as a Beatles fan: just as an indifferent movie watcher. 

A day in the life of a teenager is challenging enough, but for John, Paul, George, and Ringo it’s downright dangerous. Between getting chased by manic fans, butting heads with TV producers and admen, and fielding idiotic press questions about their haircuts life for the teen sensations is pretty hectic. But it becomes more so when the band is due to play for a live TV audience and they have to babysit Paul’s ‘clean’ but troublesome grandfather, rebel against practically everything their manager says, and hunt for Ringo when he goes missing half an hour before the show. 

Probably the most entertaining thing that I found with this movie was how it was part doco part movie. There is a great truism behind the hordes of screaming, manic fans who pretty much trample each other to get even a glimpse of the four mop-tops! Against the Beatles mania that makes up a large part of this film is the four Beatles themselves, ultimately playing themselves in slightly exaggerated versions. In this way, you could even see this flick as an early sort of mockumentary…maybe. 

There isn’t a lot happening in terms of story, in fact there’s practically nothing happening in terms of story, but what makes this flick the relatively entertaining piece of cinema that it is is the fact that it is a movie about a band starring that band as actors. As such, the banter is actually quite funny and the script is rather witty and social-realist, with jabs being taken at practically any form of authority, and not always by the young men. 

There are a few homages made to the Goons here, which are worth keeping an eye out for, and quite possibly the most memorable sequence is a deliberately sped-up and jaggedly edited sequence of the boys running about an oval, which modern audiences would recognise as it was sort of sampled in a Simpsons episode. 

Starring John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Wilfrid Brambel, Normal Rossington, John Junkin, Victor Spinetti, Anna Quayle, Deryck Guyler, Richard Vernon, Edward Malin, Robin Ray, Lionel Blair, and Alison Seebohm, A Hard Day’s Night is a reasonably entertaining film humorously chronicling a ‘typical’ life in the day of the Beatles. Filled with misinterpretations, misadventures, missteps, tricks, trouble, comedy, and a number of their classic songs, it was a film I appreciated as a film, but not one that I could watch again. I think though, if you’re a Beatles fan then it will hold much more significance.