It’s been called the Citizen Kane of jukebox musicals. Before A Hard Day’s Night, movies featuring Elvis or whoever else was the pop idol du jour tended to be rather slapdash, silly affairs, with silly scripts and silly sitcom plot points, designed to get the star’s face in front of the teeny-boppers for a short while, generate some revenue, and then be forgotten. In 1964, at the peak of Beatlemania, most people – on this side of the pond anyway – expected the Fab Four’s first film to be more of the same. After all, they were just another pop combo, a passing fad, and not very talented to boot. They were all haircut and no substance, those goofy mop-topped English kids, playing those awful “songs” of theirs to screaming adolescent girls who couldn’t even hear them over their own shrill racket. Acts like them came and went like Mayflies, which was why the studio was bound to crank out some sort of cheap nonsense in a hurry, the better to get it out there before the kids moved on, and the Beatles were yesterday’s news.
The Beatles had other ideas. They were unanimous – as they were about most everything in those days, functioning, it often seemed, as a single mind – that if they were going to do a movie, it wasn’t going to be another Blue Hawaii or Fun in Acapulco, only with Liverpool accents. It was to have a proper director (the lads wanted Richard Lester), an intelligent script, and a plot that made sense, with nothing about anybody meeting cute, struggling to win the girl, or bursting into song in the midst of non-musical situations. The shrewd decision was to keep it simple and portray a day in the life of the Beatles, the boys playing themselves, depicting what it was like to live in the eye of the greatest pop-cultural hurricane the world had ever seen, almost like a documentary. The effect would be enhanced by the liberal use of cinéma vérité techniques, as if real events were being recorded by a film crew given privileged access.
Hardly anybody, certainly nobody in the snooty guild of American movie critics, was prepared for what emerged: something enjoyable, interesting, and funny – wait, this thing was funny! – providing a rather sly, knowing depiction of the business of being pop stars, one that acknowledged the absurdity of the insane adulation that was forcing the Beatles to run and hide, literally, from ravenous fans who seemed bent on tearing them to pieces. Yes, Beatlemania was nuts, and the Beatles knew it, but what were they supposed to do besides roll with it, and try to enjoy the ride, coping as best they could? Much of the film concerns their repeated attempts to sneak off somewhere to get away from it all, just for a little while, and enjoy themselves like regular people.
The general reaction, even among the critics, was rapturous.
Attached is my own favourite scene, and the one, I think, that best exemplifies the film’s spirit. The lads are in a TV studio, preparing for a televised concert, when George wanders off to look around, and quite by accident meanders into an office where, it so happens, an advertising executive is looking for a Beatles lookalike to help push a new line of clothing. The very pretty blonde secretary – herself a Sixties archetype – takes one look at him and realizes they’ve hit pay dirt. This kid really looks the part. He’s just what they’re after. Good lord, he even sounds like one of those mop-tops, all adenoidal and using words like “fab, and all those other pimply hyperboles”. He’s perfect. Except he doesn’t seem to understand that he’s there to push product, not make disparaging remarks about what crap it is. Did he want the job or not?
Conventional wisdom has it that this is the scene in which George introduced the world to the epithet “grotty”. I’ve no idea whether that’s true.
the needlefish 