Deconstructing the process of fame: ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ by Robert Fontenot

Legendary rock critic Dave Marsh once said that Elvis movies were bound to fail, all of them, because whatever drama they contained could not help but wilt next to the true legend of the man himself. Which is to say, Elvis’ story was his own, and he didn’t need Hollywood hacks dreaming up lesser ones. This lesson could not have been lost on the men who made The Beatles films—in all five of them, the movie exists solely to reflect the glory of its subject. And not in any tinhorn costume-rack way, like Elvis movies did. John did not play a stock-car driver; George did not pretend to be living on an Indian reservation. They were four lads who shook the world, and that was the plot of each of their films, even the later ones. But that came, well, later. Perhaps no film captures the essence of the Fabs as well as A Hard Day’ s Night (now available on a completely remastered DVD). Certainly no other bit of celluloid can do a better job of explaining the initial appeal of the four. The film shows, it does not tell. It does not need to. AHDN is a perfect entity because it looks and acts like The Beatles themselves—clothed in black and white, exuberant, youthful, politely arrogant, manic, absurd, rebellious, and desperate to break free. It manages to capture a moment in time and demonstrate its timelessness; it stands as a record of a cultural explosion, a four-way personality study, a social satire, and an historical document all at once, and does all of these things so effortlessly and without pretense that only a few decades of hindsight can prove it. irector Richard Lester could have gone a number of ways with the first Beatles film. After all, Beatlemania was in full swing by the time this film had its New York premiere (August 11, 1964). Lester was himself firmly entrenched in the establishment, having made his name on the basis of some award-winning TV commercials, a bit of work with Spike Milligan and the Goons on British TV, and two films, one of which was Mouse on the Moon, a rather pointless sequel of sorts to the Jack Arnold/Peter Sellers delight The Mouse That Roared. The Goon work of course sets up the sort of looning about seen in A Hard Day’s Night, but what’s often not mentioned in American Lester biographies is the 1963 film It’s Trad, Dad! which was equally essential to the development of AHDN. Basically a venue for the trad-jazz (read: Dixieland) craze then sweeping England, the film allowed Lester to send up the traditional rock-and-roll film in a decidedly Anglo style. In this context, Lester was almost the only director suited to helm the Beatles project, and indeed, the Fabs themselves recognized this immediately. They were not content to churn out a quickie exploitation film; anyone who’s followed their art-school beginnings knows that The Beatles were almost destined to become the first rock act to exercise creative control over all aspects of their media presentation. The meeting of Lester and The Beatles, then, takes on more than commercial importance. Here were four intelligent and artistically savvy superstars bent on subverting traditional notions of fame. The film accommodates them each with an individual scene alone, which is crucial in establishing their very different personalities and simultaneously revealing, deftly, how little use The Beatles had for establishment thinking, especially as pertains to fame, art, and the work ethic. John lampoons the whole idea of fame and recognition in his exchange with the fawning Millie; Paul, in a deleted scene, unselfconsciously reveals the secret of art to a struggling young actress; Ringo (tunes in, turns on and) drops out in his exchange with a hooky-playing eight-year-old; and in the funniest and most pointed of the character studies, George rips giant holes in the illusions of a teen tastemaker tycoon. It’s tempting to read too much into these scenes, given the band’s later cultural importance, but they are remarkably tuned to The Beatles’ real-life personas. Credit the Oscar-nominated script by Alun Owen for distilling them so expertly; after spending only two days with the band in Dublin, he realized that the straitjacket of fame was a better plot than anything he could dream up, and set the process of demythologizing in motion. (Owen also nailed the Liverpool essence of the four, not only in language but also in attitude. Some of the dialogue is so regional as to be incomprehensible even to other Englishmen.) ester, for his part, realized that the film should simply be a slightly stylized version of what the band went through on a daily basis, with occasional instances of visual comedy that suggested The Beatles had already begun mastering time and space (not that anyone would have been surprised back in those days). To that end, he gave the dialogue to the boys mere hours before filming, passed that filming off as rehearsal to catch everyone off guard, used real fans for the fan sequences, and shot on location wherever possible. It also didn’t hurt that Lester allowed the lads to muck about as much as they liked in order to fill in the gaps. Take, for example, the press-conference scene: when one female reporter, assuming that the private lives of celebrities are somehow instructive, asks John what his hobbies are, he writes the word “tits.” (Away from the camera, of course. But look at it again.) The end result of all this was a bit of whimsy that had the feel of a documentary, or, in other words, a fantasy that had the ring of real truth. How could it miss? Oh, and there’s a bit of music, as well, because while Beatlemania was arriving on American shores, The Beatles were arriving artistically. A major creative leap above their earlier work, the music in A Hard Day’s Night marks the crowning of The Beatles as the undisputed new kings of Rock and Roll. The coronation features a number of fantastically shot musical sequences, ones which usually eschew the standard flat performance video standard, opting to create a mood to match each individual tune. There are the obvious plot-driven settings, like the title track as a backdrop to Beatlemania and the glorious mini-concert that climaxes the film, but there are also some surprises. John sings a mocking If I Fell to Ringo in order to break him out of a funk, the caged performance of I Should Have Known Better slyly comments, visually and lyrically, on the female fans thronged about them while they sing it, and most importantly, there’s the amazingly energetic open-field lark of Can’t Buy Me Love, which has to rate as one of the most cathartic moments in cinema history. What A Hard Day’s Night represents, then, is much more than a coming-out for a pop phenomenon. It’s one of the most human rock movies ever made, if only because it brings The Beatles, more or less as they were in real life, right into your movie theater, the same way that Ed Sullivan brought them into your living room. The Beatles are accessible gods here, young and cocky and refusing to behave but yet more than happy to let you into their world for 80 minutes, rather than create a false idol to worship. Or as the song says, they’re happy just to dance with you.

From: http://www.audiencemag.com/ARTICLES/harddays.html