Growing up I was always a little ambivalent about the Beatles. I always liked their music, I had the obligatory Beatles CD of their number one hits, but that was about it. I had friends in High School who lived and breathed the Beatles and immersed themselves in them. And they would talk about the Beatles first movie A Hard Days Night, and I would talk about The Wall. It wasn't until recently that I revisited The Beatles, their music and A Hard Days Night that I finally got it. Reading about the cultural phenomenon of Beatlemania from Flowers in the Dustbin was a revelation. I had never realized that The Beatles appearance on The Ed Sullivan show in Feb 1964 came just a couple months after president Kennedy was killed and America was needing something new to embrace. Something different, wonderful and wholly original than what America had at that moment to offer. Seeing their press conference leading up to their appearance on the Ed Sullivan show it is evident how they appealed to the youth culture of America. Whereas Elvis was something mystical and unattainable, these four lads, where youthfully comic, honest and authentic. They might have been a little cocky but not pretentious. And watching them I could understand how relate-able they were, you could identify yourself within them. To quote Kenneth Womak and Todd Davis's Beatles on Film article each one had their own attributes, "John, was the one with the sarcastic intelligence, Ringo had the affable personality, and good natured humor, George was quiet and reserved and Paul had the boyish charm and good looks."
Those personalities were suited to be filmed, and A Hard Days Night is a wonderful expression of themselves as "personalities." It was inevitable that they would make a film, but that the film would stand alone as a good film that embraced the mythology of the Beatles without succumbing to the later expectations of what the Beatles were was pretty remarkable. Credit must be given to The Beatles manager Brian Epstein, who realized that film was a great way to expose the Beatles in new markets. From United Artists perspective they signed on to release the film "for the express purpose of having a soundtrack album." Of course the focus for a soundtrack album usually laid bare any notion of a good film, the best example being Elvis whose films were in large part no equal to the man himself. I think A Hard Days Night succeeds on the merit of the director Richard Lester. His bold vision to create a cinema verite' style film shot in black and white still manages to to endearing, honest, and genuinely funny in a subtle way. Its an impressionistic look at fame and the trials and absurdity of it. The film at its heart is a "pop musical that splices micronaratives about each band member together," And on top of that it creates the musical sub genre of getting the band together and to the show in time. Which has been duplicated and copied many times in many other films. Ultimately what A Hard Days Night did in the end was cement the Beatles mythology, according to Womak and Davis. "Mythology finds its roots in our desires to tell stories about ourselves." And that's what the film did while integrating six new songs into it. I must say that I Should Have Known Better is the best song in the movie, but what do I know. In the end the Beatles would make three more feature films Help, Let it Bet, and Yellow Submarine. Those films reflect a different Beatles, a band that had with each new album adapted and changed both in their musical style, their personal lives and in their general outlook on life and fame. The Beatles are so ingrained in the culture it is easy to take them for granted but sometimes to re-discover and appreciate its necessary to start at the begining. Thats what I did.
