A Hard Day's Night (film)

• 1. Introduction

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  A Hard Day's Night arrived in cinemas in July 1964 at the precise moment when Beatlemania had turned ordinary public life into a kind of controlled chaos for four young men from Liverpool. What the film asked was a genuinely strange question: what does it actually feel like to be the Beatles? Not the screaming crowds or the hit records, but the 36 hours of train carriages and dressing rooms and harassed managers that surrounded a single television performance. Director Richard Lester answered that question with black-and-white images that would change how the world makes music videos, how television comedies are edited, and even how commercials look on screens decades later. The film had a budget of £200,000. It was shot in under seven weeks. And it was commissioned, at least in part, because a record label wanted to sell a soundtrack album in America before a rival could get there first. How a piece of calculated commercial filmmaking became one of the most influential movies of the 20th century is a story with no single author, a disputed title, and a song written on the back of a birthday card.

• 2. The Accidental Title

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  Ringo Starr supplied the film's name without meaning to. After a long day that stretched through the night, he emerged still believing it was daytime, said "it's been a hard day" and then, noticing the darkness, added "night". In a 1964 interview with disc jockey Dave Hull, Starr recalled the moment plainly, describing how the phrase just fell out. John Lennon later told Playboy magazine in 1980 that director Dick Lester was the one who seized on Ringo's slip and proposed using it as the title; Lennon also acknowledged he had used the phrase previously in his book In His Own Write. Paul McCartney, speaking for The Beatles Anthology in 1994, remembered it differently. He placed the decision at a brainstorming session at Twickenham Studios, where the band itself sifted through Ringo's verbal missteps and landed on "it's been a hard day's night" as the winner. Producer Walter Shenson offered yet another account in 1996, crediting Lennon with describing Ringo's gaffes to him and Shenson himself making the call. Whatever the true sequence, the phrase required a song. John Lennon wrote it in a single night, setting the lyrics down on the back of a birthday card addressed to his son Julian. That song, credited to Lennon-McCartney, went on to win a Grammy Award for Best Performance by a Vocal Group.

• 3. Made for a Record Label

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  United Artists had a specific motivation for financing the film, and it had almost nothing to do with cinema. Bud Ornstein, the European head of production for United Artists, stated the calculation plainly: the company's record division wanted to release the Beatles' soundtrack album in the United States before Capitol Records, the Beatles' American label, could get there first. Any losses on the film itself, Ornstein suggested, would be recovered on the disc. Film historian Stephen Glynn later characterised the project as a low-budget exploitation picture designed to squeeze every commercial drop from what the studio expected to be a brief pop craze. The budget was set at £200,000. The film was meant to be released in July 1964, which meant that when filming began in March, the entire production including post-production had to be completed inside sixteen weeks. Filming itself was wrapped in under seven weeks. The Beatles had only joined the British actors' union, Equity, on the morning of the first day of shooting, the 2nd of March 1964, at Marylebone station in London. That first week of principal photography took place on an actual train running between London and Minehead, Somerset.

• 4. A Script Written in Scouse

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  Alun Owen was hired to write the screenplay because the Beatles already knew his 1959 play No Trams to Lime Street and trusted his feel for the Scouse dialect spoken in Liverpool. Owen spent several days following the band before writing a single word. The group told him that their lives had collapsed into a relentless loop: "a train and a room and a car and a room and a room and a room." Owen threaded that exact image into the dialogue, and it became the conceptual spine of the script. His governing idea was that the Beatles had become prisoners of their own fame, their schedule so punishing that even the simplest freedoms had been stripped away. McCartney later said Owen was careful to put in their mouths only words he might have actually heard them say, and he considered it a very good script. Richard Lester framed the film's social ambition in sharper terms. He described the Beatles as the first people to openly challenge the class-based privilege that still governed British life in the early 1960s, saying the boys projected a confidence that they could dress as they liked, speak as they liked, and talk to the Queen as they liked. That quality, which Lester called something close to anarchy, was what he wanted the film to capture. One running gag encodes the tension neatly: the script repeatedly calls Paul's grandfather a "clean old man", which at once mocks the popular press habit of describing the Beatles as "very clean" and inverts the stock description of actor Wilfrid Brambell's character on the sitcom Steptoe and Son, where he was always the "dirty old man".

• 5. The Cast on the Margins

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  George Harrison met Pattie Boyd on the set when she appeared without credit as one of the schoolgirls on the train. His initial attempts to pursue a relationship were turned down because she was already seeing someone else. He persisted, and the two were married within 18 months. A very young Phil Collins, who would later become a member of Genesis, appeared uncredited as a schoolboy in the concert audience. Margaret Nolan, a prominent British pinup model of the 1960s, played the woman in the casino scene with Paul's grandfather; that same year she appeared as Dink, the golden girl in the opening credits of the James Bond film Goldfinger. Rooney Massara, who rowed uncredited as the sculler seen during Ringo's riverside walkabout at Kew, went on to compete in the 1972 Munich Olympics. The film's costumes, excluding those worn by the Beatles themselves, were designed by Julie Harris, who would later win an Academy Award. The Beatles' own clothes were credited to their tailor Dougie Millings and Son, the house that had created the original Beatles look, and Millings himself appeared on screen playing a tailor. Mal Evans, one of the Beatles' actual road managers, also turned up briefly, moving an upright bass through a narrow hallway in the background of a scene.

• 6. Cinematic Grammar, Rewritten

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  The "Can't Buy Me Love" sequence was shot on the 23rd of April 1964 at Thornbury Playing Fields in Isleworth, and it is the stretch of film that critics most often cite when tracing the ancestry of the modern music video. Lester borrowed the camera technique of undercranking from his earlier short film The Running Jumping and Standing Still Film, and he cut the images to the beat of the music in a way that had not been standard practice. Film theorist James Monroe named this editorial approach as the origin of jump cuts and "ungrammatical" cutting, arguing that what Lester did in 1964 became the daily visual grammar of music television and advertising by the end of the century. Roger Ebert went further, crediting Lester with constructing an entirely new language for moving images: quick cutting, hand-held cameras, interviews shot on the run, and snatches of overlapping dialogue. Lester himself was aware of the label that followed him; when interviewers called him the father of MTV, he said he responded by asking for a paternity test. The influence was not only visual. The film's storyline and its mockery of media attention directly inspired the format of the Monkees' television series, and its success prompted a wave of low-budget British pop films, including the 1965 Gerry and the Pacemakers picture Ferry Cross the Mersey.

• 7. Reception and Legacy

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  The film premiered at the Pavilion Theatre in London on the 6th of July 1964, with a wide release following four days later. In its first week at the London Pavilion it grossed over $20,000. When it opened in 500 theatres across the United States and Canada on the 12th of August, more than 1,600 prints were in circulation simultaneously. Its initial theatrical run grossed $14 million. Andrew Sarris of The Village Voice called it "the Citizen Kane of jukebox musicals", and when that paper published its first annual film poll, A Hard Day's Night placed second among all films released in 1964, behind only Dr. Strangelove. It was nominated for two Academy Awards: Best Original Screenplay for Alun Owen and Best Score for George Martin. Neither won; the Best Original Song prize that year went to "Chim Chim Cher-ee" from Mary Poppins. Leslie Halliwell gave the film four stars, his highest rating, and the only British film of 1964 to receive that distinction from him. In 1999, the British Film Institute placed it 88th on its list of the greatest British films of the 20th century. Forty years after its release, Time magazine included it among the 100 greatest films of all time. On the 6th of July 2004, the 40th anniversary of the premiere, a reunion screening was held in London, and McCartney disclosed that it was the first time he had seen the film on a large screen since 1964.