If I Fell

Rating: 9/10 (17 February 2007)

I recently watched A HARD DAY'S NIGHT at a local bar on their pull-down projection screen and around me I saw a roomful of people with big, fat smiles on their faces. I also saw a few melancholy faces, too, and I understood those as well, sort of. I'd seen the film many times before -- I rank it in my top 20 -- and it remains, always, fast, funny, and smart (shot in a kind of luminous black and white by Gil Taylor -- "...Strangelove", "Star Wars"). Director Richard Lester and writer Alun Owen caught a moment in time like lightning in a bottle and turned it into a jumpy, jangly thing that is as hot as it is cool and everlasting as The Beatles' music. I hesitate to write about their music or the stand-out moments in the picture (the lads were naturals, weirdly so} -- there are too many of those moments and part of the joy of the film is discovering them from that first, familiar guitar stroke onwards -- but I want to touch on that melancholy I saw in those faces. It's more than nostalgia. This is a depiction of a time that people born years after the killing of John Lennon watch and want to be a part of. You watch and want to be part of something just because it feels right. Roger Ebert was dead-on when he called this one of the great life-affirming motion pictures -- its liveliness alone is one of a kind.