The Beatles in their Springtime

Rating: 8/10 (27 August 2008)

"A Hard Day's Night" (a title based on a remark once made by Ringo) was made to cash in on Beatlemania while it was still in its early days. The film's plot, such as it is, concerns the group catching a train to London where they are due to take part in a live TV broadcast. They are accompanied on their trip by Paul's elderly grandfather, and are constantly pursued by screaming girls (something, of course, which frequently happened to the Beatles in real life). There is some consternation when Ringo goes missing, and ends up getting arrested, after Paul's grandfather suggests that he should get out and enjoy himself more, but all ends happily and he makes it back to the studio in time.
The role of the old man is played by Wilfrid Brambell, an actor today best remembered for his role in the television sitcom "Steptoe and Son", in which he played Albert Steptoe, an elderly rag-and-bone man. In that series Albert was constantly referred to by his son Harold as a "dirty old man"; hence the many references in the film to Brambell being a "very clean old man". In reality Brambell was only in his early fifties at the time, considerably younger than the characters he played both in the film and the TV series.
The film was, of course, a great commercial success; given the enormous popularity of the Beatles at the time it could hardly have been otherwise, especially as it features many of their best-loved hits from this period. It was also critically well received at the time, and has continued to receive praise from the critics, largely because of its influence on later films. Leslie Halliwell credited the film with "leading directly to all the kaleidoscopic swinging London spy thrillers and comedies of the later sixties". Roger Ebert stated that its director, Richard Lester, had created a "new grammar" of film because of its apparently spontaneous, mock-documentary style. Lester would go on to become a major Hollywood director; he also directed the Beatles' second film, "Help!".
The trouble with ground-breaking films is that, with the passage of time, they can come to seem of limited interest to all except cultural historians and obsessive film buffs. What does "A Hard Day's Night" have to interest the general viewer more than four decades after it was made?
The look of the film seems very dated today. Halliwell's comment has always struck me as being wide of the mark, as "kaleidoscopic" is not the first adjective that comes to mind to describe a black-and-white movie. I cannot see any obvious influence that "A Hard Day's Night" might have had on the likes of, say "Blow-Up" or "The Ipcress File". The film's improvisatory look probably had less to do with any deliberate attempt to create a "new grammar" than with the need to make the film as quickly and cheaply as possible to cash in on the lucrative Beatles fan market.
None of the Beatles nurtured serious acting ambitions, although Ringo was later to give a good performance in "That'll Be the Day". After making his only non-Beatles film, "How I Won the War" (also directed by Lester), John Lennon was to brand acting a "silly" profession. Here, however, the Fab Four are all essentially playing themselves in roles which call for naturalness rather than sophisticated acting techniques, and all four come across as both likable and amusing. The script is, for the most part, not great, and the comedy is fairly inconsequential, although there are some occasionally sharply witty parts that stand out. I particularly liked the scene where George is being interviewed by that dreadful phoney TV producer, and puts him firmly in his place. This exchange may have been motivated by a concern that the youth culture of the sixties was being deliberately manipulated for financial reasons. (It is also said by some to contain the earliest recorded use of the word "grotty"). I also liked the strangely poetic scene where Ringo is wandering by the canal.
What the film does have for the modern viewer is some wonderful music. In 1964 "Sergeant Pepper" and the band's other more innovative work still lay in the future, as did long hair, psychedelia, drug experiments and transcendental meditation. The Beatles were not yet a four-man cultural revolution; they were just four ordinary Liverpool lads with an extraordinary musical talent, producing some of the most wonderful, melodic, heart-lifting love songs ever written. We do, of course, get to hear a number of these; not just the title song but also "She Loves You", "I Wanna be Your Man", "All My Loving", and several others. (I know any serious Beatles fan will have all these in his or her music collection, but it's still worth hearing them in another context). As a comedy the film deserves perhaps 5/10; as a record of what Ebert aptly called the Beatles' "lovely springtime" that rises to 8/10.